(3) Xanga compared to the state-of-the-art
The comparison has less to do with having every whiz-bang feature than comparing engineering trust and elegance to the current state-of-the-art. Recall that Blogger was eliminated from the running because it had a few too many features. It's not being used in a feature-for-feature comparison against Xanga as much as a comparison of clarity of concept, quality of engineering, and trust. Blogger targets a more "serious", topical blogger across a wide demographic range, with blogging itself as the primary activity. Xanga seems to target a young, primarily teenage, audience centered around public diaries as a relationship building vehicle. Blogger directly monetizes its user base by encouraging blogs to carry AdSense advertisements, which allow Google and the blog author to share in the revenue. Xanga montetizes its user base by carrying banner ads from RightMedia (all those yieldmanager.com links), by offering "premium" services, and other little things like having the links to music for users' "currently listening to" sections be an Amazon refereral link with Xanga set as the beneficiary.
The structure of these premium services is kind of questionable. Xanga allows free users to upload up to 200mb of images, premium users get this increated to 200gb. However, they allow only 100mb of uploads per month, so really, one wouldn't even notice the difference for two months. The other premium features are also kind of bogus, like the "skins" feature which basically allows you to choose from a number of pre-built look-and-feel templates or edit the html template yourself (something that blogger allows by default but also is probably of limited use to its less-technical target audience), the "custom module" feature that allows you to add your own sidebar boxes (again, by coding the html yourself), "downloadable archives" (download your own historical posts! Wow! I have to pay to retrieve my own content? Swell...), and the ever popular "no more ads" (probably the only reason to do this). I suppose if the ads weren't so obtrusive and shady, there'd be no motivation for anyone to go premium. A WYSIWYG editor used to be part of the premium service, but has been made free as of August 2005. These "premium" features seem to be of questionable use to the target audience, calling into question Xanga's clarity of concept. Except as a side project to milk the occassional ignorant but rich user (or their parents/friends/relatives), there seems to be no particular subset of the user population that would find these features particularly attractive.
Since Xanga's main feature is blogging, users' pages start with their journal. But right at the top of the screen by the user's name are xanga's two main secondary "modes": reviews and events. Well okay, that's cool. But why reviews and events in particular? How do those features function in support of their target audience and purpose? Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, these features are just kind of haphazardly slapped onto the site without any concept of how reviews and events would function in terms of diaries and relationship networks. As a result, nobody I can find seems to use them. It's as if someone had read in an article somewhere that reviews and event calendars were "sticky" features and decided to implement them on that basis alone, with no thought of the high-level use cases.
The comment mechanisms of the two sites is pretty similar overall, although they do diverge in a number of telling details. Blogger lets the owner choose whether registration is required to comment. Xanga requires registration in order to comment with the reason:
"Due to issues involving abuse/harrassment, we don't currently allow non-members to comment on Xanga posts. If a friend leaves a comment without creating a Xanga account afterwards, their entry will be lost. :-( As we add more blocking and moderation tools to Xanga, we will consider lifting this restriction."Fine, guess there is the potential of a lot of harassment on the Internet, but wait... something is amiss. Blogger is by far a bigger community than Xanga, yet allows anonymous posting. Is it because it has more "blocking and moderation tools"? Well, no. Actually, it's about the same. Xanga actually has one extra feature (block lists), but isn't comparable since it is based upon the mandatory registration requirement. LiveJournal also allows the owner to choose whether or not commenters must register (plus has a feature for screening entries before they become public). So why does Xanga alone have this restriction? I dunno. But it has the very pronounced effect of making the community very insular. Regardless of the preferences of the owner, non-Xangans cannot participate in the community in any manner. Whether one considers this a brilliant form of viral marketing or an evil form of user lock-in largely depends on one's point of view. In the context of social networking sites like Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, or LinkedIn, this is par for the course. There's no friend-linkage between users of these different sites. In the context of other blog services like Blogger or LiveJournal, this is a notable omission since only Xanga lacks this feature that simultaneously has a large "cultural" effect.
Xanga comments also adds a featured called eprops which allows users to attach 0-2 eprops (basically points) to their comments to indicate some positive reaction to the entry. More on this feature itself later, but there's some ironic humor related to the help on this feature.
"Question: Can I delete eprops that people have left on my post?"That's just so remarkably... unhelpful. So maybe you don't like eprops, but banning a user for giving you one just seems so harsh!
"Answer: You can't delete eprops... but you can block that person from comment or propping your site ever again."
In addition to the occasionally unhelpful help, there are also a couple of oddities in the user interface. To the left, is a screenshot of the main navbar in a user's administrative interface. In addition to constantly annoying you with requests to sign up for the premium service, some of these links seem to have unknown or unexpected function. Clicking on "Email Posting" doesn't seem to do anything at all but refresh the page. Perhaps this is a premium feature or something, but the help doesn't seem to describe it at all. Clicking on "Archive Files" causes you to jump to Xanga's main page. This feature is documented as a premium item, but the behavior in free mode is positively head-scratching. I had to do it a couple of times to see whether it was some kind of intermittent error, since a lot of (poorly designed) sites will redirect you to its main page when errors occur. But no, I got a mysterious jump to Xanga's main page every time. Positively bizzare...There's more broken stuff, perhaps the most important screwed up thing. I introduced RSS in part 3, as a feature integral to most blog and news sites. It's also integral to the way that I monitor blog and news sites. However in Xanga, RSS is nowhere to be found... But wait! A quick google turns up this blog entry, which reveals Xanga's hidden RSS capability and how to access it... except the RSS that the feature generates is broken in a way that's subtle to casual inspection but is utterly unparseable by any feed consuming program (and thus totally unusable). Well, fortunately, having some conversion mechanism means that intrepid coders can come to the rescue. In this case, the same blog entry contains comments that link to people who have created programs that can fix the broken RSS, thus I am saved from Xanga's incompetance.
Tomorrow: Real Xanga wrap-up (sorry I lied yesterday, my affliction caused part (3) to end up being way long) and why I am wrong
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment