I liked Vox. Came to know a guy who worked with them from here Hawaii. Thought they did a lot right, feature and design wise, but just never caught on.

I thought Vox was good, especially given the mobile tech of the time. I could post by email and have some control over how it posted.

Would people here like to see a #qotd? Maybe I'll post one and see how far it goes....

Mobile posting via email was great too.. Even if we had to spend an inordinate amount of time stripping out the images and cruft that the carriers added to the messages!

The for-sure privacy "circles" are by far the best feature I've seen in G+. Also, finding new people to read through who comments on posts...good stuff.

Things I miss most - a "carousel" of QOTD questions, themes, and the fun we had in picking out our own domains. E.G. god.vox.com. :)

What I liked most about vox is that even my mom used it. Really. (They haven't switched to FB, nor I want them to).

I think Vox was a bit complicated at its time for many people, i.e. library management and privacy settings. Now, there are different expectations and experience, due primary to Facebook.

A Vox feature I miss in Plus are groups (community circles/streams).

"Vox was ahead of it's time and I feel that Google+ has much of what I liked about it." -- Dead on, Paul. I totally agree.

- I miss Vox a lot. Haven't participated like that since it's demise. I'm hopeful this will have some of the same "connective tissue" that Vox so effortlessly had - at least the first few years. I haven't had time this week to play with G+ enough however to give any real deep insights, but here's a few off the top of my head.

- Mobile posting is essential. And not just for people with Android phones. Is there a way to do that now that I'm missing? I'd be posting more if that was there.

- LOVE that I can make as many Circles as I want. I always wanted that on Vox. And that I can view the streams from each Circle selectively. Would like to be able to set a default view for Home stream.

- Love that Circles for privacy and "Groups" for selective posting are the same thing on G+. Vox never worked for Groups very well. I think that's one of the reasons it never grew -- one among many reasons that didn't have anything to do with the product itself.

- Can't wait to try G+ out when more of my friends and family outside of the Bay Area get on it. That will be the real test. Will everyday regular people use it like they do Facebook, or will it stay a playground of only the cool insider kids?

--If there was a Google+ button on articles I'm reading all over the web like the Twitter and FB Like buttons, I'd be using it. Haven't seen it yet. I'm assuming that will happen as adoption grows and publishers start requesting it.

--Would also like to see some (not a ton) of personalization via templated design elements and text formatting (like bullets, bold or italics on this comment for example.)

As you know Paul, I was in love with Vox and used it regularly, brining many many people into the fold back in the day. If you can capture some of the Vox magic and expand on what we learned from that wonderful, but neglected platform, I'm going to be giddy.

That's all for now...

I feel Google+ has a lot of what I liked about Livejournal (fine grained privacy, directed graph) and lacks what ultimately got me to stop using it (the fact writing a full blown blog post required too much effort).

Paul, I admired Vox a lot as a bold experiment. I was running AOL Blogs at the time and was sad we hadn't been able to innovate like that.

You also gave me flashbacks on the idiotic carrier junk they add to picture emails. There was one that didn't even send the image as an attachment, it stored it on a server and made us parse the html to retrieve it...

I second Steve's 3 suggestions (archiving/search, some limited formatting, sub-circles). I guess for the sub-circles thing you just create a Friends and a SF Friends circle and use one for everyone and the other for SF parties invites.

Thanks for all the feedback -- I'll pass it along to the right people. Does anyone have screen caps of the Vox groups? I had forgotten about those, and they were pretty cool..

Yeah, Paul, I actually took a bunch for bug reporting purposes and for creation of tutorials for my family so they would use our Vox group. Unfortunately, all of them were uploaded to and stored on Vox. :-/

Jay - when Vox closed down did you Export your photos anywhere? All mine are on Flickr.

No. That was my point. Luckily, the only things I ever uploaded to Vox were things ABOUT Vox. Everything else I pulled in from Flickr. Apparently, my skepticism and caution paid off...

Funny that you say that. My Vox 'hood was scattered to the winds and is really only coming back together on G+.

I'm so happy you posted this Paul. Really sad to have seen that product shutdown, but heartwarming to know that people noticed the thinking and quality of execution.

I must agree with Steve's point about Archives - I really miss that with tweeting and facebooking that there's not a good way to go back and see what happened during a specific period of time like I did on Vox (where it even collected my books :sob: i kinda stopped reading when Vox ended to tell you the truth - but on goodreads now)

I took a quick look and I don't see that I have any screenshots of Vox groups; emails mentioning them but the photos were all on Vox so that didn't help!

VOX did indeed rock