Odeo Disappoints
Michael Arrington
33 comments »
My patience with Odeo has run out.
The first time I wrote about Odeo was on June 13, 2005. The service actually launched on June 22, about the time that iTunes 4.9 was released and hit the podcasting world like a ton of bricks.
Odeo had tools to listen and sync, and a directory (iTunes, iTunes,and iTunes), but lacked the feature that everyone was looking forward to: the podcast creator. It was the sole feature that made Odeo different from iTunes. Fans eagerly awaited its release.
In the 4-5 months since the product was launched, Apple has released yet another version of iTunes and Podshow raised nearly $9m from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. Did Odeo release its studio tool?
No.
Instead, they released a desktop widget.
Last week Odeo did get its studio product out. It’s visually appealing. But it is so feature poor that it’s effectively a non product.
Odeo Studio
Creating a recording is very straightforward. Click a button to record. Click another one to stop. It’s built on Flash.
You can choose to add a picture to the podcast. It can be made public or just shared with friends, including by email. If you share by email, a link is sent to the recipient (v. directly sending a MP3 file).
And…that’s it. Don’t like part of the podcast? You have to start over. No editing tools. No effects. No enhancements. Nothing else whatsoever. All they’ve done is turn on your microphone, turn it off later, and record what happens in between. The guys at slawesome built this in two weeks a couple of months ago. Waxmail did something similar and attached it to Outlook. This has been done already at least twice.
By the way, if you want a free open source editing tool for podcasts, try Audacity. It’s what I use.
Odeo is not an innovator. At best they are a follower. I’m hoping they start building new and interesting podcasting features soon. But for now, even nonprofits are way ahead of them in doing interesting things with audio.
Odeo: What are you going to do to make your product relevant?
To top it off, Odeo ignores video content. I had hoped they would at least offer rudimentary support for this, but when my podcast (noboto.com) switched to video last month, the episodes stopped appearing on Odeo!
One thing, you can include mp3 sounds or music or whatever you want in the Ode Studio, upload it and include in the podcast, you also have the ability to podcast by phone or to upload a podcast made with Audacity. But I agree it´s not a tool of podcasting even for a beginner, is better to edit podcasts directly with Audacity which is free.
Another web which has some great, I repeat, great features, is Podomatic.com, with some effects, a program client which is great, Podamigo, with mp3 email, and 250 mb in the free account. I recommend you to try this service.
hey - pick on the giants! it’s so important that companies like Odeo innovate yet do so in a manner that is aimed at consumers, which is what they are effectively doing - the Odeo studio manages to make creating podcasts a friendly easy tool for consumers - maybe not as robust as a pro would need, but then again why would a pro require an online tool? Odeo is an innovator who’s trying to stay ahead of a curve when the giants of iTunes and the like are on their tails. But please, don’t bash them, because we need little consumer oriented non-giants to get support and effective commentaries not a brash bash like you’ve done here today.
Ariel, we’ve supported Odeo for months and months by writing about them repeatedly in a very positive way (see the links above in the first few paragraphs). But it’s time for them to innovate or lose. Nothing I write will help them if their products continue to be late to market and behind the curve.
my guess is nothing you write here will impact them one way or another.
I disagree with ruzz: what Mike says carries a lot of weight in the 2.0 industry (if such a thing exists). It’s a blog full of reviews, but not every review can (or should) be positive. I would expect nothing less for any of my projects.
Paul, thank you for saying such nice things. In this, case, however, I actually agree with “Ruzz”. Blogs like mine can be a good starting point for new companies to get a buzz going. Odeo already has a buzz. Positive or negative blog attention at this point isn’t going to make or break them. Quality products is what matters.
Ah, so modest. We’ll turn you into a journalist yet, Mike!
My comment was more a reflection on Odeo, and the crew behind it than about Techcrunch’s influence (though, arguably a very finite crowd of web2.0 literate types) in general.
Odeo won’t be made, nor broke on the grounds of technical types.
Ev doesn’t build things long term for techs, he aims for the average user–even if it takes him a lot of time to get there..
Microsoft usually delay their product launches for 18 months or more! Let’s give odeo a little more time to tweak their stuff. I know that a new Flash is out and pretty much obsolete the previous version, or they realize building an cross-platform app in Flash instead of Java was not bright..who knows?
i have to say i couldn;t argee more here.. i’d heard good things about odeo and the site seemed very flash and nice.. sadly using is a differnt experience.. feeds have no video support (so no systm command N or digital life.. :() and while the audio synch was good it save reaaly wierd file names in a funny directory.. ipodderx for all its userinterface and slowness problems has served me 1000’s of time better
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just 2$ from a consumer
Ed - they can have all the time they want, and I really hope they catch up.
I’ve anticipated the odeo tools for a while. This could be just the start of an interesting upgrade path. I have read about alot more functionality. Let’s see, rather than shoot them down. And this is coming from someone who’s creating podcast tools myself. I remember you looking over my shoulder at gnomedex at a podcasting tool i have in dev.
- I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s ready. It has grown alot. If I had put out what I had back then, I could have been the subject of a post like this. I didn’t want that. Maybe the money has created deadlines they can’t meet? I just have a life (ish) and spare time to fight with (for now) 
I SO want Odeo to succeed. I think it would be cool. I like the ability to have my Odeo stuff as an RSS feed so I can plug it in anywhere and I know I’ll only get the latest things no matter what client.
The tag search thing is whack. I want to find FEEDS or CHANNELS not the individual shows. And they still don’t have OPML import. And all of a sudden today I downloaded a slew of old content that had never been downloaded. And the update schedule never seems accurate. Seems like if I sub to the actual feed instead of through Odeo I get it much faster.
I really keep hoping I can do a positive Odeo rant but it always seems far off.
PodOmatic has been working on a lot of the features mentioned in your post.
We are not really well known yet so I’ll chime in to give you a short overview of our site. We don’t (yet) have a full-featured browser-based audio mixing app either– it’s a ton of work! But we decided that lack of Audacity-in-flash doesn’t mean we can’t make interesting things with audio, so you’ll find some useful and fun stuff there.
Some of our stuff:
* Online tools to record (flash) and publish podcasts. We have a simple mixer that can apply intro and outro audio to a recording for a more professional feel.
* Listener statistics for podcasters
* Telephone Integration
* an awesome (and improving) podcatcher called podAmigo
* podMail (one-to-one or one-many audo mail). We were sending podMail months before the slawesome folks launched.
* Listener Feedback Features - Post text, audio comments to shows
Everywhere we support audio, one can upload or record on the spot.
The site still has a few bugs, but they’re getting fixed about as quickly as we make new ones
Give us a try: http://www.podOmatic.com
After looking at the competition, I’m also less impressed with Odeo. Sure, it looks great and has some excellent community features, but the creation tools are less than expected - and I’ve been using them for almost two months.
Take Justin up on trying Podomatic. It’s a lot of fun to use. Also try ClickCaster and Audioblog.com. Both are also good.
No motivation to innovate … at Odeo that is. It’s not a cookie-cutter business (hmm, reference to the founder’s previous business, Blogger ;), but founder of Odeo probably thinks it is … If Google buys this one too though, then we are all wrong and he’s right. Except, that still doesn’t mean it’s a well thought-out application
Besides, it looks just like Blogger … not even creative in that dept., if you ask me.
I loved the look of Odeo and I signed up to use it as my primary podcatcher. But they just don’t update the feeds. One of my subscriptions wasn’t checked for 16 days. What use is that? I exported my subscriptions to iPodder Lemon and left them to it. Pity.
By the way, I had to hack Odeo’s exported OPML to pieces before iPodder Lemon could read it. Not sure who’s at fault there?
if you watched long enough, you realize blogging wasn’t a cookie cutter business until blogger made it one.
Thanks for the info, I was almost feeling embarressed since I had put off checking it out for quite a while. I always need two tries anyway so I’ll wait just a wee bit longer.
I have used the creator tool at Odeo and have also been disappointed by it’s stunning lack of anything. The create portion took them forever to finally go live yet has virtually nothing in it except a Record, stop and play buttons.
Make a mistake? Clear the entire recording and start again. Want to delete a sentence or a lengthy ‘ummm’? Clear and restart.
It’s also extremely slow when it comes to ‘processing’ an audio file after it has been recorded via the tool.
Eventually I got so tired of the Flash recording interface after trying it for a while that I went back to Audacity and just used those MP3s.
Gotta agree. We’ve looked at what appear to be the big three addressing this market (Odeo, PodOMatic and Clickcaster) and we’ve settled on the Clickcaster guys (www.clickcaster.com). Mosty because they do things differently from the other two that make it much easier to use their service.
They allow unlimited size on podcasts (some of our studio free shows are 500MB each). They have a kick ass built in Java recorder that’s much higher in quality than the flash based recorders on the other two services and they do it all locally (no streaming to the server.. which sucks if you’re doing a big file).
I also like their interface. Simple, clean, low signal to noise ratio. Kind of like comparing Google to Yahoo.
Check em out.
Monk
Boulder Free Radio/KBFR
http://freemedia.blogspot.com/
This is not about tools or technology, Ev said it months ago… its about service and the ability to differentiate with your services.
I have followed Odeo from the get-go, they have a polished site, good branding and their aggregation is OK. The fact they took so long on the “Create” category was I believe a realization that building audio tools for the masses was not as straight forward as building photo-editing tools.
What they have is good enough for now, for their next steps have to be about demand generation and creating the sub’s
Johnny, I disagree. The product they released is simple to build and shouldn’t have taken them so long. On the other hand, I am hearing that they have a much more feature rich product coming. If that’s the case, I will retract this post and jump right back on board with Odeo.
I understand, I too was surprised at the length of time they took. The bigger question is why they struggled, what problems are they facing and will this impact the other players too.
podomatic have beenkeen to punch out new features weekly. they seem well equiped to sneak top spot from the Ev followers.
Broader question though is simply that is this a technical issue regards success or is it more an execution issue is in driving to the right priorities. For example, Odeo search is hardly consistent (to be honets its dreadful), does this mean they don’t care abot search, what happened to self tagging they suggested earlier. No one has developed a full service option that delioevers search performance that we have become accustom too. Individuals such as eyeout and RTM are certainly doing a better job of understanding the restrictions and constraints.
$8mm is a great deal of money these days in start ups. Begs the big question, what is Ev doing with this..
Bloggers should be telling the truth with a real opinion rather than blogging to build hype. That’s where the value of a blog comes. If there are negative things about odeo, I agree we should post it.
Why are you so hard on Odeo? They’re a wonderful alternative to iTunes.