It should be no surprise that I am a big Tweetdeck fan. And this year in March I was approached by the creator of PeopleBrowsr to examine and critique their Twitter dashboard application.
Over a couple of meetings with the creator of PeopleBrowsr I volunteered this review of their product and how they should simplify the interface. Tweetdeck is beautiful because it does one thing well. I guess if you evaluate the newest Tweetdeck that has included Facebook status updates, it does two things well. PeopleBrowsr is an ambitious project that wants to become the dashboard to ALL of your Social Media communications. But too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
I opened PeopleBrowsr on the opening day of SXSWi having gotten a promo item with the URL. I remember poking around for about 20 minutes and closing the window and moving on to the Pepsi-mood browser experiment. Had I not run into one of the marketing staff for PeopleBrowsr I would not have opened it again. Much like Twirl or Seesmic Desktop, I might dabble in some other options for Twitter, but if the tool does not offer some quick wins, I don’t really have a desire to “play” with new software. [Who has the time?]
So with that, I am posting the same PPT deck I sent to the PeopleBrowsr team two weeks after SXSWi. A number of the discussions we had over lunch had already been implemented when I took my 2nd and 3rd look at PeopleBrowsr. There might be a place for PeopleBrowsr in my future toolkit, but until they can do something about the browser-dependent speed issues, I’m not really interested in switching away from Tweetdeck.
On interesting thing the owner of PeopleBrowsr said to me on the last day of SXSWi was, “You want an AIR version, I can do that in a week.”
Well, I’m still waiting, not directly but figuratively. I opened PeopleBrowsr yesterday just to check in. And while they are still improving the interface, the entire program suffers when any intensive process begins in the browser. And the problem is, these days we have been trained to be impatient with browsers and web pages. If the hourglass appears (or the beachball on the Mac) I can tell you I will not wait very look for the screen to update before I begin trying to figure out if I have crashed the browser or if my web connection has gone down.
When you have to force quit Firefox to get PeopleBrowsr to give up it’s Google Maps integration, it is not a user experience you are likely to willingly repeat. And with the program tied to the browser it is impossible to tell, is it Firefox, the Internet connection or PeopleBrowsr. But I can tell you what the gut reaction is, “I won’t do that again.”
So AIR-ify PeopleBrowsr and let’s see where the trouble is. Until then, give me ThaDeck.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/peoplebrowsr
