9 Posts tagged “team vox” from Neighbors

Today marks the first anniversary since Vox's official launch.  Although we'd been in an invitation-only beta for several months prior, October 25th was the day we opened Vox's doors to the public.  In writing about Vox's past year, it would be easy to just recount the changes and improvements the team has made to Vox's features and functionality, but instead I'm going to focus on the people -- the brilliant and creative people who make Vox and the brilliant and creative people who use it.  

It's hard to believe it's been a year since Vox opened to the public.  As you can see during the technical process to make Vox public, the team got a little punchy but then were really excited when the launch finally happened.  I mean, really excited:

In the Team Vox post on last year's launch day, we were already celebrating a diverse and vibrant community which has continued to grow magnificently over the past year.  Stop by the [this is good] feature to see just a few of the Voxers who posted to celebrate their own first Voxiversary.
 

All of our international teams are celebrating the first anniversary with us, so be sure to stop by Team Vox in France, Spain and Japan to see (and read, if you can) what they have to say.  We're all tagging our Voxiversary-related posts, QotDs and Vox Hunts with the tag "vox1anniversary" so you can check all of the celebrations out by doing a search on that tag. 

Walt was kind enough to take a photo of Team Vox outside the San Francisco office.  Isn't everyone looking Voxy?

Another important addition to Team Vox is Miss Penelope Trott, Ben and Mena's finest creation.  (Thanks to Lilia for taking this photo.)

A few of us Team members work remotely so we aren't in the photo.  So here are Kristine and Lauren from Support, and me too since I moved away from San Francisco.  Kristine and Lauren both posted about spending over a year on Vox. 

And now, for your reading pleasure, we're honoring the top 10 posts with the most comments and most favorites over the past year.  These are active English-language Voxers (We DQ'd popular Italian Voxer Luca Viscardi who would have taken several of the top spots).

Top 10 public posts with the most comments
As you may guess, topics that get people talking include race, religion, politics and cats.  Note that these are posts with the most comments, not with the most commenters.  Want to get into the top 10 next year?  Get people into a conversation in the comments!

1. 355 comments:  natalie's "QotD: Anywhere But Here"   
   
2. 315 comments:  Laurie's "Oscar Liveblog - join the fun!"
   
3. 216 comments:  Jodi's "Which would you rather eat?"   
   
4. 136 comments: Team Vox's own Nick with "Name Our Cat And Win A Prize"  
   
5. 130 comments:  Dabysan's "Guilty Pleasure of the (cough) Week - Flathead"  
   
6. 123 comments: mariser's "Liveblogging the State of the Union address"  
   
7. 122 comments: Mark's "Burning Before His Throne Means Standing In The All-Consuming Fire"  
   
8. 111 comments: crankypant's "stuff my mom says that I now realize is weird"   
   
9. 103 comments: Jodi's "Things I always wanted to do because of the song"
   
10. 97 comments: StickyKeys' "Dearest Whitefolk"   
    

Top 10 most favorited public posts or assets
Many of the most favorited posts were featured in [this is good], so keep those nominations coming in.

1. 99 favorites: Yogi's "Today's "Out My Office Window" photo   
   
2. 63 favorites: Team Vox's own Xantus' "Your very own Vox site counter"   
   
3. 61 favorites: karen's "But what would I write about?"  
   
4. 58 favorites: Laurie's "How to Make Chocolate Spring Rolls"
   
5. 53 favorites: Dmitry's "Blue Morning"   
   
6. 50 favorites: Sarajea's "An Open Letter to the Spider Lurking Somewhere in My Dorm Room"  
   
7. 50 favorites: ●ßoηi†a.in.Ρink●'s "I heart Photoshop!"  
   
8. 47 favorites: girl wonder's "the perfect deviled eggs"   
   
9. 46 favorites: DeWitte's "Email : Answers from Kids"  
   
10. 44 favorites: Sonia's "Fit Tips that are actually useful and not lame.  Really!"  
    

Happy Voxiversary everyone!  Thanks for making Vox such a great place to be!

Today is an important anniversary for Vox. One year ago today, we launched our open beta! We turned off the invite system, threw open the doors, and introduced ourselves to the world as Vox (formerly notcomet.com). I can't remember the exact numbers, but I want to say we were somewhere around 400 users back then. Reading your neighborhood page was pretty much the same as exploring posts, and the photo stream was all but owned by Byrne, who had to bring a baby in to the world before people would start to let him back in to their neighborhood. As we gathered around the fabled Six Apart couches and turned everything live, a disgruntled Rachel lamented the umm... let's say 25th... birthday party being held in her honor in Las Vegas by her girlz, while she toiled away with us chumps.

We've come quite far in this last year. We've built some great features and we've kept the place pretty clean and shiny. Krissy has asked you 365 questions and some of you have responded to every last one of them. We've made a lot of new friends, and we're even sending a couple of them around the world. You guys and girls have been so fun to work with and without all your feedback, beta testing, and piles and piles of lolcats, Vox wouldn't be what it is. Tonight (okay, this afternoon...) the Vox team will raise a glass to you all as we look forward to another year together, building the best site on the web for you to share your life with the people you care about.

One more thing, as long as I have the attention of the ENTIRE VOX-O-SPHERE: As I write this post and think about the last year of working on Vox, my brain goes back, over and over again, to the team. Everyone here is so great at what they do and so in to this product... it's a privilege to collaborate with these people every day. So, congratulations and thank you, Team Vox. Here's to another year!

*Insert cheesy montage of funny/touching moments of the last year; fade to memorial for fallen team member (TBD); end scene.*

Here are some posts from various team members from last June first.

And now, the Hall of Ancient Screenshots:

 

 -- Steve (Pants Party)

We're feeling the love here at Team Vox HQ today, and wanted to share some of it with y'all.

We all arrived to a Valentine from Ben & Mena's little dog Maddy. 

Other Team Voxers were in the giving mood too;  Jamison distributed old school Valentine cards and Nick went with the non-traditional bacon popsicles, which Steve's chihuahua Rudy liked a lot.  There are gorgeous bouquets of flowers on the desks of about half the team. Maybe all this love had a profound effect on Rudy, because he tried to steal a kiss from Maddy.  Or maybe it was just the bacon popsicle.
Happy Valentine's Day!

<3,
- Krissy

Vox has become such a huge part of Six Apart that it's hard to believe it wasn't around this time last year!  Team Vox wanted to take a moment to reflect on 2006.

Vox has been in development for more than two years, but its debut beyond the confines of Six Apart HQ came this past June.  Code-named Comet, an early version of the service launched as an invitation-only beta with all Six Apart employees getting just a few invitations each to invite their friends and family.  Team Vox established an energetic development schedule, releasing new features, changes and tweaks a few times a month and paying close attention to user feedback. 

Development and testing continued over the summer, and invitations were slowly doled out by the handful.  Mena and a few other team members traveled to key cities across the U.S. to hold preview parties and to develop the community beyond the Bay Area.  The traveling team also gave a ton of interviews and product demos which resulted in stellar press both pre- and post-launch.  Vox was written up in The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Newsweek, Financial Times and in many more publications.  

We also learned early on that Vox’s clean, simple and colorful design had attracted some very creative users.  Inspired by enthusiastic entries to a Vox coloring contest, we announced the Vox Banner Contest where the Design Team would choose five user-submitted banners to turn into Vox themes. After reviewing over 600 entries from the community, the team decided to choose 50 winners and have been releasing their themes throughout the fall.

Vox opened to the public on the evening of October 25, 2006, and Six Apart celebrated with a fun launch party on October 26th at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco.  Vox users had something to celebrate when the Vox World Tour Promotion was announced that same day.  By signing up for a Vox account and posting about their enjoyable experiences on Vox, users are automatically registered to win an all expenses paid trip to see and experience the three cities where it was born - San Francisco, Paris, and Tokyo.  (There's still time to enter!)

For a service that launched less than two months ago, Vox already has an active community with a vibrant, inviting personality.  Vox users, or Voxers as we call them, have taken the concept of friends and neighbors very seriously, forming strong bonds with the other Voxers in their Neighborhoods.  Voxers have begun to put together meetups of their own, gathering in San Diego, Boston, Long Beach and London, with more planned for next year.

It has been an exciting and rewarding year getting Vox off the ground and we can't wait to see what 2007 brings!

In the meantime, please take a moment to enjoy the Six Apart holiday movie.

- Team Vox

While we're all getting ready for the holiday weekend, I stopped a few members of Team Vox to find out what they're thankful for this time of year.

Steve's thankful for:

• Live music at San Francisco's awesome venues
  
• Twisty roads and vintage two-wheeled vehicles
• The changing political climate
• Japanese game show clips on YouTube

Randy's thankful for skids, breakbeat, torque, tea, Essex Street, a good belay partner and his puppy Pista.

Beau's thankful for:

• Ocean waves to ride.
• A few days off for a road trip in a fast car to see family.
• The stellar team that made Vox a reality, and all the great information people on Vox have shared.

David's thankful for his family and his wonderful girlfriend, Natasha.

Kevin's thankful for his family and the midterm election results, adding: "What more would I want than those two things?"

Mena's thankful for Maddy, the dog she and Ben adopted from The Milo Foundation this past year.  Maddy's made their lives so much better and Mena can't imagine her not having a home. 

Kristine is thankful for:

• family and friends – especially during the holidays, it’s great fun to have people who care surrounding you.
• being crafty again makes her heart happy
• having Vox to record all the fun events her life, and watching her family join in on their own recording, too.

Brandy is thankful for:

• her family, especially her husband who always seems to know just what she needs
• new friends that she has met through Vox
• a job working with a product that she enjoys daily

Lilia's thankful for her wonderful friends and family, including her fabulous husband and her Vox peeps who she says are the absolutely best part of Vox!

I'm thankful for my friends and for having an endless supply of music.

Tomorrow's QotD will be "What are you thankful for?"  We can't wait to read your answers!

Thanks for reading,
-Krissy

We want to remind everyone that a few of us from Team Vox are headed to Austin this week.  Mena will be speaking on the "Your Life Online" panel at the seventh annual Texas Conference For Women.

On Thursday night we're also having a meetup and Vox preview party at the Beauty Bar.  If you'd like to attend, be sure to RSVP to this link asap.

Austin Vox RSVP

You must RSVP to be on the guest list.  Hope to see y'all there!

-- Krissy

Boston Voxers, we're headed to your city.

On Tuesday night, Team Vox is hosting a Vox preview event in Boston.  If you'd like to attend, please email me and I'll give you the details. Unfortunately, space is limited so we're probably going to be able to invite the first 5-10 people who reply. (The list is full!)

If you can't make it to the event, you can always check the Boston Vox blog next week to see the photos!

-- Krissy

As some of the Voxers may have already noticed, Vox is an international community.  One of the goals of Vox is to be a place where you can meet your friends and family from all over the globe, but also feel at home through a user interface in the language you're comfortable with and with services that are local to where you are.

The Vox team is actually in a few locations around the globe.  While most of the Vox team members are in San Francisco, team members in Japan and France contribute their ideas and hard work to help make Vox into a place that translates globally. 

Over the past few weeks a few of the members of Team Vox from Japan (including myself) went to San Francisco to work alongside the SF members of Team Vox.  When we're in Japan, members of the team communicate regularly via email, chat, video conferencing and of course, Vox!  But, it really helps us gel as a team when we can get together to work and communicate at the same place and talk about Vox.  And of course it's nice to talk about things besides work and to get to know each other.

Vox started their preview period in Japan in July a little bit after the preview period started in the US.  The main difference between Vox in the US and Vox in Japan is that the user interface is in Japanese.  However, the user interface of Vox is displayed in the language of the person logged in, so even if you don't read Japanese, you should be able to visit Japanese blogs and if you see something you like, please drop a [this is good] (which is of course the universal currency for Vox).  Another key difference is that Vox for the Japanese audience connects to Amazon.jp instead of Amazon.com, in other words were trying to make Vox feel like home for Japanese users also.  However, despite these differences, Vox is essentially the same in Japan or the US.  New themes and features are released at the same time and Voxers can connect to each other regardless of the language that they see Vox in.

Our trip to San Francisco was a great trip, we got to be with the rest of the team for Release 10 and while I'm in Japan, the other two guys are in San Francisco working on Release 11, which should again be a great release!

- Dice