Review: Spokeo, a social network aggregator
So I got tipped off to this site Spokeo after my Bloglines review and have been checking it out a little. In some ways it’s similar to Bloglines but has a much different focus, it’s part of a new wave of sites that are looking to aggregate all of your social network in one place. It’s interesting, it’s pretty good looking and useful but I do have some problems with it.
Here’s what it does, basically you feed it all sorts of things - like you your Flickr friends and it will automatically monitor their updates and alert you, similar to an RSS entry, when they post new pictures. Of course you can saddle it with your various RSS feeds. You can give it your twitter login and it’ll grab all your friends’ twitters and throw them into the mix. According to them it can watch all sorts of services, like bebo, blogger, digg, friendster, MySpace, Youtube and a couple dozen more. Very notably missing is Facebook - which is odd given their developer friendly stance.
It works very much like what is becoming a standard 2 panel rss reader. In the left panel you organize all your bits, you can group them together and it doesn’t matter if you mix up the different types, so you can have rss feeds next to flickrs next to twitter people. It’s pretty cool that way. It has an overview of all your buddies that shows you, in a very concise way, all of the different updates in order of their updating - again all different types are mixed together. It’s very useful and easy to see - it’s my favourite view.
It then has the single feed view, so if you view an RSS feed it shows you some summaries of your feeds which you can expand using keyboard shortcuts or click off to the main site. If it’s a flickr account it’ll show you a few thumbs of each days uploading which you can expand out or click to the album. Everything kind of works in this way.
Unfortunately there’s problems in paradise. First off, the overview mode should be useable by group, so if I want to get an overview of just a single group, I can just click on that group and it’ll give me that nice concise summary - sadly it only works for everything. In general, there should be more group level functionality, as far as I can tell now groups are only good for being able to make the left panel a little more manageable.
The other problem, sort of closely tied to that is the summary view of individual feeds is too large. On my big monitor when I look at an rss feed I can see maybe 6 titles on a screen, contrast that to Google Reader where I can see 30+ on the same window. This makes it very difficult to scan. In addition, in the left panel there’s a way to see only the groups that have unread items in it, but there’s no way to just see all the unread items specifically - once you know that some feeds and twitters have unread items, you have to go into each one in turn and check out what you haven’t seen yet. This really slows down your ability to go through things.
I think that if you have a bunch of friends on various social networks and you want to keep track of them all in one place Spokeo is a worthy option. Especially if those friends are not doing a ton of updating every day. But as a general purpose tool - I would never load all my rss feeds into this and try to use it as my everyday reader - it simply is not optimized for quickly going through a ton of updates. They need to optimize the interface for quicker reading, more group based functionality and they gotta add in Facebook. To some degree they compete with Facebook as more and more apps get added in to suck various content into that platform. Still, Spokeo is a clean, distinct, aggregating interface that’s worth checking out if you can’t keep up with all your buddies accounts all over the place.
September 7th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Thank you for writing this extensive review on Spokeo. Your feedback gives us a lot of insights, and we are going to evaluate each one of them in our next design meeting.
Our design goal is different from any other RSS reader, since we can syndicate non-RSS multimedia. We are built for casual reading, so we try very hard to stay away from complicated feed management. We want our users to come and get a glimpse of their networks’ updates, then they can just move on.
This is why we don’t give our users too many options. Our users don’t need to care about advanced functionalities, and they probably don’t. We decide and stick with the default, and this is why our UI is so much cleaner than any other reader out there.
It’s like IPod vs. other MP3 players. IPod does not have FM/AM support, or recording sounds, or any of other jazz. However, because they don’t have to integrate these peripheral features, IPod is the easiest to use. Spokeo is the same. We are here to aggregate and syndicate information, so our focus lies in syndicate broader content, and do it faster. We are not here to enable people to share or comment.
Of course, our decisions on the default design can be wrong. This is where our user feedbacks come in, and this is why we thank you for writing this extensive review. We will seriously think about your suggestions, and if they make sense, we will throw away our current design and make yours our current default :)
September 7th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Harrison, yeah, that’s exactly the sort of audience I thought this product would be good for! But, beyond that I think your interface wouldn’t need much to start serving a more heavy usage audience (i.e. me :). Very broadly just two things, if you tweaked the “overview” screen so that it behaved a little more like google reader where it’s quick hits that you can expand down. And giving a means to view all the unread stuff across feeds. From a UI perspective I think that would not be too big a departure - since all the components are pretty much already there. Other stuff like more group functionality would be icing on the cake. :) Please don’t think I’m suggesting you should throw away your current design!