OK, halcyon_shift sent me an invite, so I thought I'd spend the evening playing around. Make that less than an hour playing around.

First impressions? It sucks. Supposedly, it's easy to use ("turnkey" in the ad blurb, aimed exclusively at a US audience obviously). Well, maybe it is.

If you're on a fast internet connection. To "design" your layout, you get to pick how many columns you want, where you want them, and what, pre designed theme you apply. You only get to choose their templates, no real modifications at all. But to choose them, you need to wait for all their little preview images to load. Nice and slowly.

Now, anyone note a trend on my websites recently? Note the dark background/light text, mostly white on sludge-grey? I like this colour scheme, it makes my eyes not hurt if I look at it for awhile. There are two options for white text/dark background. Tokyo by night (right...) and Shit Brown. OK, they might have different names than that but you get the picture.

So, the "design" option lets you design diddly squat. Now, if it was called "customize" or similar? At least it'd be honest, but I get to desing nothing. But I could chose a theme involving Mena Trott's dog. Lovely.

I then tried to make a post. Now, this appears to be easy, and idiot proof. Except it's rich text only, using clunky icons that are similar to standards but, well, look wrong.

For a "turnkey" environment, is a new user going to know that that chain link symbol is "insert link"? Perhaps. But how do I follow usability rules and title my links? I can't? Oh, that's nice.

I want some help composing. Is there a direct link to the compose help page anywhere? No.

Can I turn off the Rich Text editor and put my own code in? Of course not. Now, it's turnkey, coding isn't "easy", in fact, a sales point is you don't need to learn that "funny HTML". Well, ok, most people don't give a shit about backend coding, I'll give you that. But isn't it a little patronising to your userbase to assume that they all think that knowing the basics of what Sir Tim came up with to, y'know, make the internet usable is just "funny" and unneeded at all?

The "Knowledge Base" is patronising at best, annoying at worse. There are no options to turn off annoying "helpful" features (at least even Gates let's me turn off that annoying paperclip), and, well, it looks ugly.

The ads are inobtrusive, I'll give them that, at least on the blog pages. On the compose page? Bit bright gif down the right of the page. Bright yellow. Really needed that.

Six Apart remain rubbish. Vox is a Livejournal clone with the good bits taken out. It has plus points; the adding function is easy and intuitive, and I think I'll get used to using the navbar on LJ a bit more once people start using it themselves a bit; simply clicking a button from the journal page is useful.

But, overall, for a company that owns a succesful platform that could easily have a turnkey interface bolted on to set up a different, competing, inferior platform is just daft. If they implemented the good bits from Vox into LJ, then they'd be spending less money and making a better product. Ah well.

Guess what I did this weekend? That's right, I did nothing. Wonderful. I need to get some energy back and break the apathy attack