JulianSchrader.de

Review: Blog-Community Thoughts.com

I’ve been invited to check out thoughts.com beta, a service offering Free Blogs to “share your thoughts”. But it’s not only about blogging, they also offer free photo, video and podcast hosting.

Blogging is a popular phenomenon, so there are many businesses out there offering very similar services. Thoughts.com want to be special by creating a community around their users’ blogs and media.

Another social network?

Facebook, flickr, del.icio.us, twitter, Digg — you name it. We have to sign up everywhere and it get’s really difficult to update information all over the place.

Actually, there is a solution — OpenID. Unfortunately Thoughts.com doesn’t use it, so I can’t login just by providing my OpenID URL. Instead, I had to go through the following steps to sign up:

1. Enter personal details (full name, e-mail, birth date, city…) and accept the site policy.
2. Identify the distorted numbers on the first captcha.
3. Upload profile picture.
4. Second captcha — why? Do they really believe some bot could get past the first captcha and not make it through the second one then? Come on, it sucks to search for the avatar.jpg on my harddisk twice just because of a typo in the field “security code”.
5. Invite friends — why? I don’t know the service yet, how could I recommend it to my friends? Fortunately there was a button to skip this step.

After completing these steps you end up on your profile page. There are some links at the top — amongst others, the most important: Make A Post. Click.

Next: An overview of all of my posts, pictures, podcasts and videos. Every single box says “nothing found” — why are they there, then? Oh, on the right side, there’s a box with even more links.

After clicking on New Blog Post my browser loaded a form with fields for title and tags, a drop-down menu to specify the group of people I’m going to allow to see this post and a WYSIWYG editor to create my new post. And another security code.

Conclusion

I don’t think Thoughts.com will make it without some major improvements. It simply sucks to be forced to identify captchas all over the place and I think they need to make their design more appealing ASAP — it’s very boxy and unclear so far.

Update: Just got junk mail on the internal mailing system of thoughts.com. It doesn’t seem to be possible to delete the account. At least I could remove this check mark:

Note: The preceding was a paid review.