Vox Media is excited to announce that we have worked closely with Google to integrate Google+ into Chorus and across all of our properties — SB Nation, The Verge, and Polygon — in several different ways.
First, new users to any of our 300+ brands will be able to create a new account using Google+ to authenticate. This makes it quick, safe, and secure to sign-in and start interacting with the community. On both the iOS and Android apps for The Verge, users can also sign-up for an account using Google+ as an authentication option.
If you already have an account on one of our properties, you can easily associate your Google+ accounts with your existing Chorus account by visiting your Account Settings page.
Once you’re authenticated with Google+, no matter which Vox Media site you’re on, you will have the option to quickly share a story (including FanPosts, FanShots, and Forum Posts) with your circles of friends using Google+. Look for the Google+ Share button.
Finally, new users that sign up for an account on The Verge using Google+ authentication will get a special feature. If they’ve previously registered an Android device with Google, during the sign-up process on The Verge, they will be prompted to install The Verge’s Android app over-the-air with the click of a button. Pretty cool.
From the very beginning we have provided our users with choices about how they signup and sign-in to our sites by offering the ability to signup with OpenID, Yahoo and then Facebook. Adding Google+ is another high quality authentication option that we’re excited to introduce to the platform. We’ve been impressed by how Google+ is being developed not only as a destination but a broad communication layer across the Google ecosystem. This evolution of Google+ provides opportunities for strong integration with Chorus for an improved user experience across all our sites.
This is just the first wave of Google+ integration, and you can expect it to deepen over time.
We’re excited to have been invited by Google to participate in the Google+ Developer Sandbox at Google I/O, their annual developer conference in San Francisco. Along with a wide-range of other companies who have worked closely with Google, we’ll be showing developers what we’ve built and answering questions about how we approached our implementation. Stop by and say hello if you’re attending this year. Each day of the conference we’ll be highlighting the Google+ implementation of one of our properties - The Verge on Wednesday, SB Nation on Thursday and Polygon on Friday.
# # #
Vox Media is moving into a new office space in Washington DC, leaving behind a humble rowhouse in Dupont Circle (Editor’s note: you can catch glimpses of the space in episode 2 and episode 9 of Polygon’s Press Reset series).
The vast majority of the product team have had their Vox experience shaped by the time they’ve spent in the place we’re about to depart, and we asked our coworkers for their thoughts on the beloved office.
When reached for comment on the final days of the fabled workspace, Chief Product Officer Trei Brundrett mused, “can I just send you my tears?”
Senior front-end engineer Dan Chilton remarked, “I’m going to miss the ol’ girl. With her nooks and crannies; her yesteryear elegance and charm; her thin-walled unisex bathrooms. But then again, what do I care? I work from home!” Even all the way in Missouri, we can tell he truly cares.
“I’m definitely going to miss the current office,” product manager Niv Shah added. “It had a lot of character.”
Do you see the Fathead of our CEO, Jim Bankoff, on the wall above?
Trei fondly reminisced about “Tiger Room”, the original workspace for the product team when Vox Media relocated to the rowhouse in 2009.
“We called it the tiger room because there was no door, and so I ordered a bamboo-beaded curtain,” Brundrett said. “I selected one with a white tiger because they are sports elegant.”
Jokes aside, Tiger Room was where the product team developed SBNation.com, paving the way for several huge breakthroughs in the company’s history, including the launch of both The Verge and Polygon as new verticals to complement the flourishing sports network.
The original usage of the “Tiger Room” name back in 2009 during SBNation.com development sessions.
“It makes sense that our office is a townhouse because in so many ways it felt like home for those of us who worked here over the years,” said product manager Chris Haines.
“It’s a beautiful building,” remote designer Warren Schultheis opined. “The first time I visited, it seemed like the whole company could fit in the conference room.”
When Vox moved in, there were only six employees on the product team. Four years later, there are 41. Who knows what the next four years will bring?
# # #
The process, which was hugely collaborative, included writers, designers and developers. “We have a flat organization, and we find that building great products absolutely requires cross-team collaboration,” he said.
An excerpt from a recent piece on SND.org featuring our Director of UX (and Vox old-timer), Ryan Gantz. Read the whole thing here.
# # #
Jim Bankoff, our intrepid CEO, just announced the newest addition to our Vox family: Vox Creative. Check out the teaser trailer above, or read TechCrunch’s full write-up on Jim’s speech today at TCDisrupt.
# # #
At the old Verge offices, not all of us had desks— or chairs for that matter. I’m happy to report that in our new office, not only do we all have our own desks, the product team even has our own room!
On my desk, I have a monitor propped up by an empty hard drive box. Please excuse the tape, it didn’t quite make it back from CES in the best shape. I think it adds character.
Resting on my monitor is a Pokemon toy I got from McDonalds. Oshawatt the otter Pokemon is always smiling and it makes me happy. I know that a lot of the DC bros have bobbleheads. I have my little wobbly Oshawatt.
For my computer, I use a 13-inch MacBook Air propped up on a Rain Design Stand. I choose this computer because I’m more comfortable with the Mac operating system. I love the portability of the Air, and how fast the SSD is. It’s a great on-the-go machine. Not shown: a Lenovo Yoga 13-inch running Windows 8 for quality assurance work on The Verge.
My headphones are by V-Moda. I’ve been exclusively using V-Moda since 2007. I love all the different models of headphones they make. The one shown on my desk is the V-Moda M100s. I also have a pair of M80s with custom plates.
I charge all of my devices at work—including my special Pikachu edition Nintendo 3DS XL.
My iPhone 5 was stolen 3 days ago, so now I’m getting by with a loaner phone. Because of my line of work, I also have a Samsung SIII, a Blackberry Z10, a Nokia Lumia 920, and a Droid Razr M.
Being a journalism nerd, I’m really into my pens and notebooks. I have an Action Book that I use to manually track our editorial features and long term projects. I have a to-do style notebook from Muji that helps me with my day-to-day task tracking. I also have 2 Rhodia notebooks that I use to take meeting notes. I also use a Post-it system to enhance my Action Book. I love orange post-its and the special Shiba-Inu stickies from Muji. I love pens made by Sharpie. The ones with the silver caps are my favorite pens.
Also on my desk, I have a giant bottle of seltzer. At the new office, we treated ourselves to a seltzer machine because it was going to be a lot cheaper than the amount of canned seltzers we drank per month.
Because we just moved in, there is still a lot of potential for decorating my desk. My desk neighbor Scott Kellum and I are looking into purchasing a cat-a-day calendar to share. I’d love to get some posters or comic panels to tape up at my desk but I haven’t found anything amazing yet.
# # #
Hello, we are the Vox Media product team. We are designers, developers, operations engineers, and product and community managers, based in Washington, DC, New York, and Austin, and distributed remotely in cities from Santa Barbara, California to Springfield, Missouri.
