Checked out Sponit tonight |
Earlier today, I put my email in the sponit “please send me a beta password” list and tonight to my surprise an email arrived with the invitation. I dove in, registered and found a small registration bug which I notified the devs about and then checked sponit out. The sponit folks said “it would be nice” for those of us with blogs to mention them, so here we go.
This is how their help page describes itself:
At sponit, you’ll be able to post pictures and stories into what we like to call “spons”; spons are like snapshots of life. “Well isn’t that blogging?” We designed the site to be like blogging but without a lot of the annoyances associated with blogging. At places like xanga and livejournal, the committment of having to constantly post is a pain. At sponit, you can make one post, and be the most popular poster on the network.
Since I was in early there wasn’t a lot of content/pictures uploaded yet and I kept seeing the same pictures over and over again, including my own uploaded entry. Also this picture of Ann Coulter in latex that scarred my mind.
In the screenshot above, I numbered the main sections 1-4 in dark green to see and they are explained below along with a view of each area:
1. The random next sponit screen. Basically a picture with some text and title to the left of it. Beneath is the ability to rate it and looks like this:
2. Click on “post spon” and you’ll see the form below allowing up to 5 pictures to be uploaded, a title, subtitle and the text. The title and text are the only required fields.
Beneath the long textarea box there is also a Location field (?) and a Category dropdown box. No tagging or ability to set your own categories from what I could see. The category choices as of this writing: Other, Jokes, Parties, Personal, Sports, Business, Fiction and Non-Fiction.
3. By clicking on “myhome” you can view stats of your spons views and rating. You can also edit or delete your spons and view other spons you have marked as favorites. Also, spons from your favorite users.
4. Search on the title and the matching entries are returned. Better remember the title, because it doesn’t allow searching any other fields yet.
My 2 1/2 rusted pennies
I originally learned about sponit at Techcrunch which Mike Arrington called “addictive.” Maybe he saw a different version of sponit than me?
I appreciate the sponit folks letting me take an early peek — thank you — but if I’m being honest (and I am) nothing here seemed very innovative or new except their name. Yeah, it’s kind of neat that everybody is feeding off the same rotating traffic, but unless a lot of people use this, there won’t be enough traffic to go around as the pool of content grows. What would make this any better than posting at their own blog (and who doesn’t have one of those already?) and possibly getting some Google or other SE traffic down the road, which in sponit’s case will go to them, not to the content contributor? Or for that matter post the pics somewhere established like Flickr?
In their beta test email they used all caps to point out that the site is “STILL IN BETA AND WILL BE UNDERGOING REFINEMENTS BEFORE RELEASE.” I don’t know who the target audience is, except maybe the MSN Spaces and other mostly non-blogger crowd? Yeah, you can upload content as a story but I didn’t see any RSS feeds so how is it to be shared beyond sending people to sponit.com?
I do like that they have a fiction category, as I could see how having a couple pictures and a short story posted with it might be kind of cool. Also, the bug report I sent in on a Sunday evening got a response right away, so they are definitely interested in and active in response to feedback.
It is possible some of what I think is missing (more expansive search functionality, RSS feeds, blocking your own sponits from random view, etc) will eventually be in their public launch.
Did this post make you go hmm?
(Hmm, no ratings yet)
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well i dunno if i think that your review is necessarily right. i mean the site is pretty cool because you can get way more visitation than on regular blogs. i mean alot of people out there hate posting multiple times or just want to post something funny once.
Comment by yuri stanzler — December 12, 2005 @ 2:03 am PST
yuri - do the math, how do you figure you can get “way more visitation than on regular blogs”? Let’s say there are 1,000 pages and 5,000 people surfing (which there isn’t even close to that much exposure there yet). The average person surfing surfs how many pages? 5 pages? That means there is a 1:200 chance that surfer will see your page. Even if they search 50 pages, that’s still 1:20. Now what if there are 10,000 pages? It jumps to 1:2000 and 1:200. Now how about 100,000 pages? Now you are talking 1:20000, and 1:2000.
The more pages, the less likely the person will see your page. The more people, the less pages, the more likely a person will see your page. That’s basic mathematics. What are you seeing here that I’m not?
Compare that to coming to your blog through a search engine and there is a much greater chance that person will see your page (especially if your on the first page in the SE). Sponit is going to need a ton — and I mean a ton — of traffic to an individual page the amount of traffic that one would get on their own or by using another already more popular search that has the traffic.
And I’m not sure where they get that people “hate posting to blogs” — where is that crowd when there are millions and millions of blogs already out there (and more being created every day) and tools that make it ridiculously easy to post?
The other problem is that people are not going to surf through the same pages over and over again. Sponit needs to work out something that doesn’t show the same page to the same person over and over again and currently that’s not happening, it’s just being randomized. Random is cool if it randomly shows folks something they haven’t seen already.
Comment by TDavid — December 12, 2005 @ 9:09 am PST
i think we’re solving the problem you present because we’re implementing tags this weekend. we think that’ll increase visitation because it’ll allow people to find specifically what they want. also, the odds you speak of, are in fact better overall than a traditional blog site. if you setup an account with xanga, blogger, etc your visitation is worse if not way worse than our visitation — especially if you only make one post. this is just what we’ve been thinking about…this is a good dialog tho
sorry it submitted my un-proofread version when i pressed return for some reason.
Comment by shaz — December 12, 2005 @ 2:38 pm PST
Hi shaz - thanks for stopping by and commenting (the dupe was removed). Glad to hear about tags, what about RSS?
Comment by TDavid — December 12, 2005 @ 3:00 pm PST
we’re actually thinking about writing our own standard — something similar to rss that will plug into rss. the problem with rss is that it doesn’t organize posts in a manner conducive to sponit.
another addition you might find interesting is the messaging feature. this will allow you to message other posters privately. the messages will be linked to the posts.
the final version of sponit you’ll see next week won’t be significantly different, but it will have alot of additions that we currently don’t have on the site. two of which are tags and messages. we’ll be doing many other things this weekend to make the site better so please save your final impressions until we release.
also if you’ve been having trouble accessing the site, please keep trying. our server has been crashing and we’re in the process of moving from $5/month hosting to a nice dedicated server. we hope to be on the dedicated tonight — for all you gurus out there, we’ll be running our own compiled version of gentoo.
Comment by shaz — December 12, 2005 @ 3:51 pm PST