Glogster - Like Geocities (in a bad way), And In Flash
Michael Arrington
31 comments »
Glogster is a new service that lets users create web pages (they call them posters) using Flash elements. Upload photos, songs, text and other stuff, drag it around, and call it a day. You can embed the poster on another website, but its too big for most blogs or social networking sites at 960 pixels wide. You can also add friends, so technically its a social network.
It reminds me a lot of Geocities back in the day (remember?), perhaps because of the colorful backgrounds and chaotic mess that results when you create a page. Lots of people created Geocities pages, added a picture, a little text, a guest book and a website counter, and that was their home page. No one visited more than once, though, since the page lacked fresh content.
And that was waaaaay before the days of social networking and the explosion of blogs. Today people have a lot more to do on the web except read news, buy stuff at Amazon and send a few emails. Glogster either needs to find a way to widgetize this in a way that gets MySpacers and Facebookers excited (see Slide, RockYou, etc.), or they will likely stay a ghost town. Strike that, even with a reasonable widget strategy, I doubt Glogster has a very bright future. Frankly, it isn’t as good as Scrapblog, which targets the same niche and launched nearly a year ago.
People remain enamored with Flash as an environment to create websites, though. Wix, an Israeli startup in private beta that is doing something in this area, is getting good reviews from people who’ve seen it (we still haven’t). We’ll see if they have a business model that breaks out of the Geocities ghetto.
Glogster is giving away some iPods and gift certificates to new users who create posters and satisfy a set of too-complicated-for-me-to-read rules. So if you’ve got some time and lack an iPod, there you go. See Download Squad and Go2Web2 for their take on Glogster.
Sometimes I miss the simplicity of Geocities, my second website was hosted there in 95/96
GeoCities was great. One middle-schooler posted a ranking of all the girls in his school, ranked by “hotness”. To make things worse, the last person on the list was a guy. Needless to say, school officials were not too happy, and had GeoCities pull the page, but not before the first viral “hot-or-not” page made its debut in ‘96. (Ironically enough, the guy who posted the page went on to design Verilog for Sun’s graphic cards at 16.)
Seems pretty interesting..
Haha, very nice review.. Maybe I’ll take the free iPod and try Glogster later!
Nhick
http://www.itrush.com
Interesting concept but flash is sooo 2002, it has been replaced by Silverlight!
Anyways, a day will come when flash/ajax/younameit will become user friendly enough for everybody to use, right now, flash is development hell compared to the ease of html, most dynamic websites can be converted to use Ajax but even then - why bother going through the extra expense and extended development cycle for a first run of a site. The whole “create your own website for free” was an interesting business model back when but today, this type of system, no matter how designed is still a dime a dozen… until somebody designs something truly revolutionary that is. Just about every ISP and domain registrar offers free websites with domain purchases as well… and you thought social networking sites where saturated!
Jon
Geocities!! my first website was there it was disgusting hahaha
But if this one is in flash… I assume it is very heavy to load. I really hate flash web sites, although I used one of them lol ironic:
http://www.spymac.com/details/?2319811
Friend I think there are as many social networking sites as users just like all bloggers and no readers, makes the scene very cluttered.
http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
Why write about it then?
I hate Flash sites.
Whoa. Stop with all the Flash hate. Sure, it’s a poor choice for text-heavy Web sites (most sites). But as a animation/video/audio/rich-widget platform it’s a dream to develop in. It’s the concept of a static page (Geocities) and not the technology (Flash) that’s flawed.
Fun to work with…and not as “bad” as was mentioned in the original post above…the audience for the site is obviously not techies but for the general non-techies who just want to have fun with their creativity. Overall a decent website.
bookmarked @ livbit
http://www.livbit.com
http://love.glogster.com/
This was so much fun
Good for saving scrap photos of travel or parties
Hey i have posted a review on this too. I ve checked it in go2web director and found out that it is pretty cool.
check my take on Gloster at http://pcsplace.com
Well Gloster is nice and pretty cool….
Check this website http://www.LimeAll.com
Hah, I remember GeoCities - it was a fun little hosting service and a great place for anyone with no design skills to get started.
With that said, hosting nowadays is so dirt cheap that relying on a third party free hosting service to store all your hard work is just asking for trouble. Combine that with the fact that anyone nowadays can install Wordpress using Fantastico with a few clicks and have a decently-looking website running in less than an hour (and that’s with no HTML skills), and I frankly don’t see why people would get so excited about a service that shaves off an hour’s worth of a learning curve in return for a massive loss of control over the final product.
Yikes.
Well I can’t check it out since I’m typing this on my iPod Touch and it doesn’t support Flash.
…then again, I already have said iPod, so I don’t see a reason to bother. :p
Look like a scrapblog copy. Wix looks interesting.
Flash is pretty, yet very limiting - especially without a true DOM.
Wix is pretty slick and sexy. I’m a beta user. My first impression of the software, though, is that I’m finding it hard to figure out how to make a “professional” type site. Right now, I see the target demographic as the tweener crowd.
Mike, you still have not received an invite? What’s up with that?
Anyways, I agree with Adam, as the site is slick, although there is not enough to make a professional website (perhaps they should encourage users to do that for them).
If I had invites available Mike, I’d send one your way…although I would have to figure out what email to send it to first.
I like the site, however the pages are really annoying to look at. The UI is really fun, but I would rather simplicity. I have a similar service (but much simpler) at:
http://www.webepags.com
“It’s so easy!”
Just another way to show off to your friends and family with “look at what I shat out!”
Looks great–looks like it could appeal to somebody’s vanity. Oh and thanks for the mention of Scrapblog. I can’t wait to see what they will do to compete against Blurb.
Looks like a poor man’s attempt at http://www.wallop.com
I’d send this to the dead pool right now.
Ethan
http://backpackingonlittlemoney.wordpress.com/
seems like a cool site! thanks for the heads up….
Sounds very similar to http://www.moonfruit.com a free flash-based website maker that has been around for ages (and does have a lot of users). But moonfruit is much more feature-rich than drag-drop ‘posters’.
I so remember GeoCities with such fondness. My first website - Another Windows 95 Links and Resources Page went up in late 1995. I stayed with GeoCities until just after the purchase with Yahoo.
I have so much GeoCities SWAG it is not funny. I earned quite a few things with their point system.
I agree with the earlier poster - I miss its simplicity at times.
Possibly this service should connect with few social networking site where people can edit their profile page easily, not sure whether it has that feature?
I was never a fan of Geocities, but I used Xoom
As for Glogster, unless they create something new, how will they stand out of the croud?
Nuno
The UI sucks big way! Wasted lots of time trying make something that looks ok, but no luck.
Its Cool website.