Crazy Like a Vox

Vox.comFor the past few days I’ve been playing around with a beta account of Six Apart’s Vox.com, a somewhat late entry into social networking for the pioneering company behind Movable Type and Typepad. (My account came courtesy of Anil Dash, who, magnanimously, bears no apparent grudges from my earlier, less than kind remarks about Movable Type, circa 2006.)

Vox follows the by now familiar interaction model for social software: buddy lists, comments, photo sharing, blogging, etc. If you’ve used Friendster, Flickr, MySpace or any of their competitors, you probably already understand how Vox works sufficiently well to get up and running with little learning curve. Apparently, one of the site’s intended key differentiators is its tiered approach to functionality. ‘Starter’ users can do more or less what you can at, say, Friendster: create a profile, build a buddy list and participate in comment threads and discussions. So-called ‘standard’ — and presumably paying — customers will also be able to blog, manage media (photos, audio, video) and choose from various built-in themes to skin their presentation in the Vox universe — those features haven’t yet been released to everyone, but Six Apart promises them in the near future.

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Overcoming Roadblocks to Blockwriter

Here’s an update on Blockwriter, my concept for a text editor that’s as reductive and productive as a typewriter. After a fair amount of reader interest, I was disappointed to find that no Cocoa developers actually stepped up to claim the idea and run with it. Of course, it’s presumptuous of me to assume that any idea I throw out there will ignite a flurry of developer activity, but still, you can’t blame me for hoping a similar application would magically appear on Version Tracker one day.

Then I got a note from David Goodman, a MetaFilter reader who liked the idea enough to post it to Ask MetaFilter, in the hopes that someone could point him to a similar product for Windows. A respondent to that post, apparently, decided to take up the challenge and, according to David, has begun to code a prototype in Python.

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