Sometimes is wierd to say how story's evolve on the internet. One would think, that between thousands and thousands of voices, blogs, websites and podcasts it is hard to seperate the songs from the static. But still. Sometimes a story is written in just the right key that it chimes out and resonates through the internet. Sebastians review on AIM pages is a perfect example. An article that begun on his own website has been picked up by AIM and its hardcopy's are now scattered over the tables of the design team at AOL to guide them in the redesign of AIM pages. Enjoy.
Knightwise.
AIM Pages by Sebastian Prooth.
As you will find out when you listen to episode 4 of the Global Geek Podcast I tried to sign up to the new AIM Pages service.
I decided to go back today and try and get a profile going over on AIM Pages. I started to create the profile about 20 minutes ago and I have had multiple problems while creating the profile which I will share with you, so you don’t waste your time with this website until you have read the problems you might encounter while registering!
Number one, the site is NOT intuitive, not easy at all. I am glad I have blog creating experience or I would have been struggling to get this profile up and going. Once I selected a profile from the tech group, I applied one I liked, or so I thought, more on this later.
Then I proceeded to actually fill out the “modules” and build the profile. What a yawn. The about me section malfunctioned every time I opened it up to edit it, and once I had placed the text and said OK I want to keep it, I saw that it did not show up against the background, so I went back into the editor and selected white text, to show up on this brownish clay coloured background.
The photo uploading system is difficult as well, once you figure out that save does not mean upload/keep, and you have to hit upload, you will be greeted with a dialogue box that has an upload interface, good luck getting it to work the first time around! When I selected the images to caption them once I had uploaded them, it took clicking around them, on them, everything, to get the caption box.
I realized after trying to set up the Contact me section, not to bother. Why? Because what you select to show up as methods of contact don’t even show up when you hit apply!
And if all these problems were not enough, I decided to have done and apply the profile. When I did I was greeted with a totally separate theme than the one I had selected, my words did not show up against the background so I had to highlight the text on the page to read it, and most of all when I went to edit the page again, it died in the ass. Totally. I was not able to get back into the edit area where I had been before.
One final problem and the one that just made me leave the entire endeavor. I went to settings, and it brings up a dialogue with one option. Leaving AIM Pages? Click Yes to delete your profile!! Oh yeah, thats a setting alright! You can check out what I eventually got out of the profile here – As you can see, the text is the wrong colour (Invisible)!
Is AIM Pages a MySpace killer? Umm.. Let me think about this one. Absolutely not. There is no way on God’s green earth that this website is a Myspace killer, I could not even configure a profile, with 11 years of Internet using experience. I have been using Myspace to store a profile for over a year, and I have never had the problems like I have had in 20 minutes trying to build a profile on AIM Pages. Web 2.0? More like Web .20. If I were AOL or whoever is behind this, I would be ashamed that some meeting deemed it ready to be released for use… it just isn't – Comments Welcome