I was recently reminded that, not only do I have a Vox account sitting there doing nothing, but also that some of my friends use it as their primary, or at least secondary, blogging outlet these days. So I figured I'd mess around with it, and see what happens. So far, this post is really a test to see if the crossposting-from-my-own-blog thing actually works or not, although I half suspect it won't.
So, is anyone else using Vox for anything at all? I can't help but notice that, as a blogging platform, Vox didn't really take off, did it? This seems a shame, because after looking at it properly, it's actually not bad. It's much more useful than Livejournal in a lot of ways — I like how you can customise it to add recent books you've read, or CDs you're listening to (you can even upload mp3s1), and I like that the comments aren't nested2. It would be nice if I could find a way to make it look more like my actual website, though.
The other thing I was reminded of was Jaiku, as I finally got an account after requesting an invite months and months ago. To be honest, since it's still in beta, and accounts are taking forever to be distributed, I'm not sure it's even much use, though. Initially, I thought it would be a great alternative to Twitter when the latter's SMS service was no longer made available to UK phones. You can get Jaiku messages sent direct to your phone, and the nifty thing is that it seems to recognise when these are status updates, and when they are things pulled in from RSS feeds, as I don't receive the latter from anyone, which is nice, as it's not really much use getting updates from, say, Flickr, as an SMS. And you can comment on individual posts, which is also very nifty.
But if nobody is really using it, because no one can get an account (I get updates from only one person at the moment), then it's not really very useful. It is easier to find things, though. For example, I know that there are hundreds of channels in existence on Twitter, but no idea how to find such things. There's a whole directory of them on Jaiku, though. This is useful if you go to an event or something and want to find out what other people are saying about it, and you don't even need to actually know anyone else on Jaiku for it to be useful.
On the whole, though, I'm going to have to stick with Twitter, just because everyone else that I know is sticking with Twitter, and the main reason I use such a service is to stay in touch with my friends. But if anyone else is on Jaiku, let me know.
1And here's the "Pop" part of this post.
2I hate nested comments. I can see how, in some cases on Livejournal especially, they might be useful, but the option to not have them would be great too.
