Entries tagged “neighborhood”

This is the third post in a series where I'm pointing out some nice little touches that take up less than a 100×100 pixel square on a screen. Today's is from the Vox Neighborhood page.

Sure, Vox is still in preview. Sure, I work for the company that makes it. There's still one little detail that absolutely bears pointing out for being an extremely thoughtful touch.

Vox carries on two well-established traditions for networked communications sites. The first is representing users with a small, changeable icon next to their name, as most of us are familiar with the concept of an avatar or profile picture. Then there's the ability to aggregate all of your friends' posts into a single view, which is an innovation that LiveJournal helped popularize years ago.

The combination of those two things makes my Neighborhood a very personal, human space for me to read about what's going on in people's lives. But the small touch that really made the page work, to me, was that there were four tiny profile pictures in the corner.

Where so many services would have had a generic "network" icon, maybe with a globe or a sphere indicating this was my world of friends, I was really pleased to see the Vox team put the faces of my actual friends in the page to illustrate where I am. It even updates the people to reflect whomever's posted most recently.

That's what 100 Perfect Pixels is all about, a little touch that takes something from sufficient to really delightful. And the Vox Neighborhood is exactly what inspired me to start this series of posts in the first place.

Resources

• Naturally, you can take a look at my Vox neighborhood.
• Not a Vox member yet? Ask for an invite.
• Vox also inspired me to write about Making Something Meaningful.
• See the other posts in this series of 100 Perfect Pixels: Amazon's Gold Box, and Nike Plus

Way back long ago, when the Internet was still in black-and-white, I read Jamie Zawinski's report of a fire in a tire warehouse across the street from where he lives. I was in New York then, and had never really spent any time in San Francisco as an adult, so I had no real idea of the geography of the city. I kind of shrugged my shoulders, marveled at the first person report being online so quickly, and went back to my web surfing. To give you an idea of what things were like in that simpler time, JWZ's photos of the event were actually captured on film, not on a digital camera.

Today, the Six Apart office where I work in San Francisco is across the street from the location where that warehouse fire took place. Reading the news reports from the time reveals what a radically different neighborhood it is today from nine years ago. Perhaps the best demonstration of this change is the photo I took with my camera yesterday of the new building that's risen in the same location.

Despite the bemusement of my Vox neighborhood, I think it's a really fascinating transformation. Obviously, neither tire warehouses nor "custom Studio Becker cabinetry" are really my aesthetic, but that idea of rebirth and reinvention is what makes cities and communities so intriguing to me.

I don't think I would have guessed nine years ago that JWZ would live a block from my office (we still haven't met), I would live a block from this office, and across the street, that same location where all those tires burned would inspire articles describing frenzied condominium sales. "[T]he 300-unit Palms at 555 Fourth St. is logging similarly dazzling numbers."