Daily Grumble

I made a Fotolog account

with 18 comments

And I might be deleting it soon. Yeah, already. There are a number of problems that really put me off ever using the service. Here we go…

  1. It’s a ghost town – I don’t know whether it’s just because the interface is so clumsy, but there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot going on. One photo a day is supposed to push people into commenting more often, but the place seems deserted.
  2. It’s impossible to find anything cool - It’s pretty difficult to find any pictures that you’re interested in. No tags, no categories. There are groups, but these don’t make things any easier. Searching Fotolog results in a Google style list of titles and descriptions – no thumbnails. What good is that?
  3. The ads - I don’t mind ads in free services, providing they don’t get in the way. On Fotolog they distract you from the pictures themselves. That’s no good…
  4. It’s ugly as hell - That combine with a pretty unintuitive interface makes for a pretty lousy experience.
  5. The comments - When you do find some sort of activity. There seems to be a lot of MySpace-like BS comments. Also it seems most of the members don’t speak English… I’ve got nothing against that, but if I can’t even understand what anyone is saying, what’s the point?

In short, I’ll stick with Flickr in the future for my photo-sharing needs. I thought this could be like Twitter for photos (restrained in an interesting way, with an awesome community) but the lack of a decent way of finding good content/members ruin something that could have been pretty cool.

Written by Jamie

January 4, 2008 at 6:25 pm

Posted in Internet, Photos, Social Networks

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

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18 Responses

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  1. Jamie, good comment; good blog. I work at Fotolog and wanted to talk about some of your issues. We’ve always grown organically as our members recommend us to their friends, which makes your experience dissimilar to 90% of the people who join Fotolog. That is to say, people tend to step into a thriving community of people they know, not a ghost town. As we’ve grown – and we’re growing like CRAZY – we’ve realized that we have to do more to address the needs of people who don’t know that many people on Fotolog yet. We’re working on a series of projects that should shorten the learning curve and make it a lot easier to find the cool stuff.

    On the other hand, I don’t agree that the site is ugly, and 14 million registered users find the interface intuitive enough that they’ve made us one of the 20 biggest sites in the world. (16th biggest right now, if you believe Alexa.com.) I hope you don’t delete your account yet – stick around a little while and see if you grow to like Fotolog too.

    Yossi Langer

    January 8, 2008 at 12:29 am

    Reply

  2. Maybe ‘ghost town’ wasn’t the right phrase to use. Obviously any site that has had 259,852 new photos added today can’t be considered empty (especially when only 1 photo can be uploaded by a member each day). But I was trying to express how difficult I found it to get involved with anything that was going on (maybe something like a ‘Recent Activity’ page would help). And like I said in the above post, the search feature would really benefit from thumbnails.

    I haven’t deleted my account yet. I still log on almost everyday and have a click around.

    Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post.

    Jamie Clark

    January 8, 2008 at 5:35 pm

    Reply

  3. Hi there Jamie,

    I discovered your blog-posting through Google Alerts and shared it with some of my colleagues. I am always interested in feedback, especially from new users – we know about the long term addiction :)
    I hope, you stick around for a while and make some interesting friends. And if there’s anything I can help you with, let me know.

    – Elke
    http://www.fotolog.com/nydiscovery

    Elke

    January 11, 2008 at 7:38 pm

    Reply

  4. Good 235rter2rwer23r

    lloyd

    September 12, 2008 at 7:29 pm

    Reply

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