Last month, fellow bogger Ian sent me an invite for a social networking site called cre8Buzz.
Signup
Upon following the provided link, i was presented with a rather hideous looking signup form.
While looks aren’t everything, i really thought it could do with a bit of TLC. This was demonstrated very nicely when i opened up the drop-down list for “Community”.
Yikes!
So to sum up my pet peeves for this form:
- The title for the top menu doesn’t make sense to me
- The community list is too long, and isn’t sorted (a combo box with autocomplete might have been a better choice).
- There isn’t enough white space, especially around the “Email notifications” fieldset.
- There is a Cancel link and a Save button next to each other – very inconsistent!
- I am left wondering does the “Destroy This Account” button and the “Cancel” link perform the same operation.
- Why would i want to “Destroy This Account” when i haven’t logically created it yet?
- In general, there is no flow
In addition there is the glaring omission of any notice indicating that i am binding myself to their Terms of Use.
Terms of use
The Terms of use are themselves rather interesting. There’s mention of “subscription fees”, and only “personal use” (i.e. non-commercial) is allowed.
In addition “automated use”, “transferring your profile”, “displaying an advertisement”, “telephone numbers”, “street addresses”, “last names”, “URLs or email addresses” are all prohibited.
Lets not forget the usual indemnity section.
And of course apparently i automatically accepted the agreement when i “used” the site, and further affirmed it by “becoming a Builder” (i.e. making a user account, although technically i didn’t make one).
Granted, most of these sites have such agreements nowadays, but it would have been nice if i could have explicitly agreed to it when accepting the invite.
So remember, always read the terms of use.
The front page
After filling in the form and subsequently signing in, i decided to look at the front page. And here it is in all of its glory:
So pretty much like any other Social Networking Community whatever-you-want-to-call-it site. Although like the form before, i have a few pet peeves about it:
- Clicking on any of the items on top of the search box merely highlights them, making them feel very disconnected from the search box.
- In order to edit your profile you need to click on “My Stuff” and then one of the links under “Manage my Profile”. Not very obvious.
- The “Help” is rather odd. It lists a set of categories which you must click in order to reveal a set of questions which have an expander box besides them. In order to reveal the answer you need to click on the question, not the expander box, the question! Yikes!
- Like the invite form suggests, you can only belong to one community.
Features
From what i can tell by looking at the site, cre8Buzz supports:
- Blogs
- Audio, Video, Photos
- Forums (per community)
- Group questions
- Comments on almost everything
- Friends
- Personal messaging
- Favourites
- Themeing your profile page (hmm, sounds familiar)
- A widget you can put on your website (see below)
Conclusion
Rants aside, i wish the best of luck to the cre8Buzz team. I think it will be interesting to see how well their site fares in the ever competitive Social Networking market.
As for whether or not i am going to use it, I’ll have to think about that one. Still, i have 5 invites left so if anyone reading wants to try out cre8Buzz, give me a buzz by posting a comment below.
