I'll be the first to admit it: I'm truly a thankless bastard.

As well they should be, everyone is gushing about Web 2.0 these days (despite the unflattering things that article says about my wonderful employer, I think O'Reilly's piece is the most profound piece of Internet industry trend analysis I've read in years). So many cool new online apps coming along recently. But I'm so greedy, all I can think about is how eager I am for Web 3.0, when all these cool apps work as well as they should.

Flickr is awesome, by far the best photo sharing utility out there, but could they possibly make it any harder to navigate? Please? Del.icio.us lives up to its name in more ways than one: it's terrific, but also uncessarily hard to navigate. (Its navigation problems are the exact opposite of Flickr's: Del.icio.us has too few navigational options (e.g., why can't you just search from the homepage for terms people have tagged?), so it's hard to root out the valuable socially-charged content that's in there, while Flickr has so many ways to get at its content, I often spend 10 minutes of clicking to find the exact feature I need to manage my photo files (e.g., just try to create a Set based on a Tag in less than 100 clicks).

But let me direct today's fuller criticism to Writeboard, a new stripped-down shared document tool from the innovative folks at 37Signals. By and large, it's neat. But here are a few pointed criticism I have of it (the first one which I emailed them about and never heard back on; another black mark):

1. Saving is a pain and a time waster. Every time I save, it closes out the editing window of the document and shows me a saved page version of it. To get back to where I was in the document, I have to go back into editing mode and scroll back down to where I was. Compare that to Gmail, which saves a backup of the document (granted, not time-stamped versions of the document like WriteBoard) but keeps me in the editing window and maintains the state of my position in that editing window. If I'm writing a long document and saving frequently in WriteBoard, it means several seconds delay every save (even for "minor saves" which do not create a new version of the doc). It serves to discourage frequent saves which defeats a key benefit of the service: document mangement.

2. Every time I create a new document, I have to create a new log-in and password specific to that document. I'd much prefer having a general login (so it's the same as all my other non-essential web apps, so I don't have to remember unique passwords for each document) and then see all the documents for my account. This idea of a new login for each document seems nonsensical.

3. URLs are not active hyperlinks. I just created a list of bloggers and their blogs for a project, but the URLs are all dead, requiring my colleagues to cut and paste each one into the browser window to look at them. Duh.

But, aside from that, it's definitely useful. Let's all just agree to hurry up, put our socially-networked, intelligent-crowd heads together and release at least Web 2.1 sometime in the next year or so.

Comments

Posted by: Zane at November 18, 2005 11:05 AM