Vox, my views so far
I though it was about time to give some feedback about Vox. Having seen someone post a Vox blog entry about Vox I decided this is a great way to allow my comments to be put in context by anyone who feels they want to comment.
Although I have only been using Vox for a short time, and I only signed up with the expectation of deleting the account after a few weeks, I do rather like it. I will be keeping my main Blogger blog hosted on my web site for more serious blogging, but I will probably continue to use Vox for more personal and frivolous blogging.
Many people have described Vox as MySpace for adults, but I think Orkut for bloggers is a better description. To that end I would like to see a more structured profile that allows me to optionally add answers to set questions about myself. The beauty of the ones on Orkut is that the answers give a good indication of your true self without asking questions that you just have no definitive answer to. "What is your favourite piece of music of all time?" is not a question that most people can answer definitively.
There are also a few feedback posts on Vox from people that are not about the post, but someone trying to make contact. I do not want to publicly broadcast my email address so have it hidden in my settings, but I don't mind people making contact with me. To that end I suggest having a feedback form that users can post a message to another user privately. This does not need to be a full messaging system, just a way of delivering a message and reply email address from one user to another, probably delivered by email.
I love the question of the day feature, this have caused me to keep checking back and keep posting. It would be great to have different classifications of post so a QOTD post can be distinguished from a normal post. This could perhaps be integrated in to the profile instead of the questions I suggested above. Perhaps this could be expanded to allow the user to create classifications of there own ("conservation" or "question" for example) but as this can partly be done through tagging this may be a feature too far.
I would like to know how many people are reading my posts and how. I don't want to be watched while reading a blog so identifying who looked is a step to far in my opinion, but to get a rough idea of who many would be good. Tracking of the RSS feed would also be good in a was simpler to FeedBurner, or integrating to FeedBurner would be great. Hiding the RSS feeds and adding a temporary redirect to FeedBurnber feed is probably the best way to do the latter.
Another thing that would be good is the ability to produce some custom templates. Although I like the stock templates I feel I would like to personalise this further if I use Vox as an extension to my on-line identity.
Finally there is on thing that I always consider when using Web 2.0 services, and that is where is the money coming from. I am guessing it is from advertising and this will not become a chargeable service. This is good for me as it is highly unlikely that I would pay for the Vox service for the benefit I get from it. If this is the case it might be worth clarifying it as I will be less keen to continue to experiment with a service that will be removed from me because I would not pay fore it.
Those are my thoughts for now, please feel free to comment, and keep up the good work.