H to the izzo, M to the acro

“It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.”
- Katie Hepburn

Innovation by degrees is pretty much how things progress most of the time. Great leaps of knowledge and/or accomplishment are rare, but usually much more memorable than the scintillas of ground gained daily in any given area of focus. There are innumerable ways to kick the can forward a millimeter or two if one so desires. One of the most common could generally be referred to as the Bizarro technique. It works like this. Find a successful idea, business or service.. and do the exact opposite – be it stylistically, content-wise or even context-wise. With the utter captivation displayed lately by all flavors of media for ‘microblogging’, is it any surprise that we are now witnessing the rearing of ‘macroblogging’s ugly head? Well… a little bit maybe.

The reason business models like this get funded is the same reason we see mostly sequels coming out of the major motion picture studios across the globe. It refers back to what’s generally regarded as a ‘known quantity.’ IRL speak that means “_____ business made a profit or is on its way to profitability. Let’s just rip that idea off.” Of course, deftly done, ventures like this can be quite successful. Clumsily executed they can instead be transient, ineffective and even off-putting to their intended target audience.

Our favorite by far is Posterous. chak hates sign ups with a passion so it was a pleasant surprise to see how easy the Posterous team has made it to get an account going. In fact there IS NO sign up process which made us giggle like Peter Lorre in M. It might have been the whippets we were doing at the time but we have to admit that once you hit the main page of Posterous it’s hard to not want to give it a try. The UI and entire initial experience is just intuitive and fun, which is oh so rare on the Tubes these days.

To get yourself started, send an email to post@posterous.com. Anything you include will go into your first post. Send a pic, video, txt, audio or your favorite malware .exe on up and then watch the magic propagate. Of course, flying out of the gate smoothly is all for naught if somebody set the hurdles up wrong. From what we can tell so far, the Posterous team nailed the reeling-in aspect in addition to the hook `em aspect. Changing any aspect of your account or posts is clear and easy to find with a smart and uncluttered interface, color scheme and work flow. Usually we found things in the first or second place we looked for them. Want to create a password protected account? Change your user name? Layover your own domain? Add Google Analytics? No probs at all. Will we use it on a regular basis? Probably not. But it’s clear that the team behind this puppy is bursting with flavor and coming out swinging. We can always respect that. Keep the honey drippin’ Posterous. We’ll be back to lick it up l8rs.

Toobla on the other hand… oh Toobla. What in the name of dear sweet Berners-Lee are ya doin’ over there? Man we TRIED to figure this sucker out but there’s just not much there. What IS there didn’t work too well for us. The basic concept behind Toobla (as far as we can tell) is to sort and confine all of your material into folders. Yep, that’s right. When you first sign up, you have an “All My Stuff”, “My Photos” and “My Videos” folder. Sweet! Just like Windows 95! Tell me more! No wait.. don’t.

Also we appreciate minimalism but Toobla takes things a little far with no user nudging or experience shaping what-so-ever. You are left to your own devices with one AJAX Feedback tab, an all purpose ‘Add’ button and a walkthrough being the only consumer facing top/nav links. It’s not an ugly site, and it’s not super difficult to use, there’s just not much there. Lastly, the one folder we created, called ‘Books’ into which we imported our Shelfari collection never generated a preview image. It’s just a blank white rectangle with no books inside. Our suggestion ladies and gentooblamen is to have a standard placeholder image for any folder that fails to generate a thumbnail. Even a picture of say… we don’t know… a FOLDER? We backed away slowly and just left poor Toobla to its own devices. We’ll check back later and hope the technical difficulties are just birthing pains.

imindi (eye-mind-eye… get it?), while unfortunately named, does sport some cool features. Like Posterous, they make sign up as easy as emailing them, but it’s a more standard ‘activation link’ process which suits us fine. Once in the site things are set up in a ‘think tank’ form. It’s really just another way to label topics of discussion from “Art & Creativity” to “Innovation & Technology”, but it’s an effective choice of differentiation that struck us as at the very least – slightly clever. It affords your contributions an aura of authority whether they contain one or not. I mean.. I’m adding to a THINK TANK. Usually we just add to the drunk tank so it’s a nice change. Once you get past that though there’s not a lot of depth to imindi, but perhaps this is really due more to the tender age of the service. Also they had a rough road to launch so we’ll cut them some slack. One last thing we really appreciate is the full-on HTML editor provided for the meat of your submissions. We’d like to have more than five words for our micro-headline but we have noticed that it does force the user into penning haiku like headers. We’re big haiku fans here at chak… especially dirty haiku. Just makes us happy.

What?

Last up is an even more problematically named service that takes the Bizarro business model technique to a dangerously, if entertainingly lazy place. Generally referred to as “Woofer” in press relases, comment sections and blog write ups everywhere, the URL is in fact – woofertime.com – which just confuses us to no end. Sure you can Bingle it but making your brand different from your actual URL is risky bidness ioo. Never the less, Woofer gets the award for biggest LOL when you first hit the front page. They decided to take the ‘parody’ route and stick as close to Twatter’s design as possible. This is an important distinction to make as some tech journos are already crying foul and saying that Woofer has placed itself in an actionable position re: StoneCo. We don’t think so. There is a long and illustrious history of parodies using mimicry as part of their freedom of expression. In fact, if the Woofer team had tried to lift only PART of the most popular microblogging design in the universe then perhaps they would get a friendly cease and desist email. As is though, they have differentiated themselves by offering a Twatclone of the macro variety. If you can grasp one you can grasp the other, and that’s the smartest part of Woofer. Anyone sour griping about the design is just jealous they didn’t think of it first.

Having said that, beyond that initial fun factor – for us the appeal is limited. Still we’re happy to see Woofer barking up Biz’s tree if only for the lulz.

So if we had to recommend ONE of these services to futz around with we can heartily say that Posterous is the most fun, easy to use and useful of these sites. That’s not a compliment really since all of these sites are utterly superfluous and will mostly likely be gone within years if not months. It’s a bit like crowning one pickled egg the king of the pickled egg jar. The number of people who care about pickled eggs is pretty limited in the first place (specifically to professional fire eaters, the Pennsylvania Dutch and any drunk, starving person who has run out of other options). Most people walk right by that dirty screw-top jar at the end of the bar, and rightfully so. Thankfully, macroblogging won’t make your farts lethal or stain your fingers a funny color. Now THAT would be REAL innovation.

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