The people behind BT Tradespace asked for my thoughts on this new service. Pre-announced as beta in February and heralded by ZDNet UK (who clearly had not seen the service), it is half baked and will fail in its current form. There are simply too many things that have either been missed or don’t work in an intuitive manner. I will say from the get go – others don’t agree. A podcast discussion on the Andy White – The Podfather show recorded earlier in the beta phase was positively gushing. The relevant bit starts around 4 mins 30 seconds into the show.)
I know the development folk are trying hard to get this right but I am amazed that BT has allowed this to go out in its current form. That tells me much more about BT’s level of understanding of social computing than it does that of the development team. And yes – it is built on Microsoft technology, not that it matters for the purposes of this discussion. Though it might in other contexts.
The best thing I can say about BT Tradespace is that it does provide a neat way of making your presence known in a potentially large community. Developing a presence is not difficult but there are parts of the overall process that are either unwieldy or confusing.
The individual ‘home page‘ for each member shows plenty of information, has a rating system and the means to subscribe to different parts of your presence but ultimately, it is lacking. Why? Despite it being marketed as a community site, the community tools are either poor quality or missing altogether. Here’s what I found when developing a presence using the free service. Bear in mind the discounted price for the full service is £135 ($270, €203) pa, but that includes BT specific extras:
- Email confirmation did not arrive.
- No obvious link to my home page after I have completed any of the administration tasks.
- The site preview screen is confusing. There is a link to a preview but there is no link to the active site. Instead there is a reference to a URL (not a link) that is implied to be available AFTER I have confirmed systems settings. But that seems broken. Either way – I am confused.
- The community directory is chaotic with no apparent organisation once you arrive.
- The members list has no logical structure or sequence. If it gets much larger, it will be impossible to navigate.
- Individual community areas for different broad group interests are a shambles. At least the Web Services area is. BT says there are communities for software and web services but when you arrive at the web services community, they’re jumbled up. It looks like someone vomited onto the page. The Business Services area which I joined doesn’t look much better. BTW – does services include flogging jewelry? If it does then this group needs a categorisation system.
- BT Tradespace talks about keywords when it means tags but it doesn’t tell the user how to separate them. This is important because different systems use different methods
- Search…forget it. It timed out on the main page
- Creating blog posts – which are confusingly described as News/Views in the tabbed header is unsatisfying. There is no block quote capability, you can’t upload inline images or video and cannot cut and paste from other blogs without having to recreate all the links. How many will bother?
- There is a Tell A Friend capability on blog posts but what about Invite A Friend?
- You need thumbnail for all video uploads – why, when YouTube, a supported format, provides something that could be scraped?
- I don’t get the sense that I am able to easily discover other people. OK, the groups are a good start but I want thumbnails, something like I can get at OpenNetworks.
- There is no feeds option so I can’t include information feeds from elsewhere that I find interesting. That means people can’t contextualise my presence very easily and I can’t expand the information pool outside to the wider Internet. That is becoming increasingly valuable as a research and discovery method.
These are the things that were immediately obvious to me. I’ve probably missed stuff. Feel free to add stuff in comments. In short, it’s hard for me to feel incentivised into going back. I’m sure there is plenty of nuanced thinking to be applied here. For instance, BT has a massive customer base. If it presents this to them and it doesn’t work or deliver value, then who steps in to fill the obvious gap? From a client perspective, it would be difficult to recommend this service over others. That will change but for the moment, it’s an embarrassment.
PS – Sorry guys but I really wanted to like this given other work you’ve done.
Technorati Tags: BT Tradespace, innovation
