Review post courtesy of @Dr_Malcolm on Twitter.
Ok, here I sit reviewing a website as a guest blogger for @ErinBlaskie, and of the 3 sites she was looking at I drew Placepop.
It’s basically a mish-mash of FourSquare and Twitter, and so far as I can tell, it doesn’t do either of them very well. I signed up only to find the damned thing has a city in Ghana as the default hometown of everyone who signs up. It took me a whole 5 minutes to realise this though, and a further 2 to change it. I would like to have those 7 minutes back, really, as they were really quite wasted.
Now that I have my location fixed and some of my Brampton, ON haunts added to my places, you might wonder then…’what now?’ That’s what I’m wondering myself, what is this site all about? I didn’t see an FAQ about it, so I realised I’d have to figure this one out on my own, so I decided to click on ‘find places’, thinking this would give me some clue. Guess what I found, the people who frequent this site are by and large in San Fransisco, and browsing members gave me more than 300 pages of members who joined and got bored very quickly. 20 members to a page, and maybe 20 pages of regulars, most from San Fran, almost all from the States.
What we have here at it’s core is a social scene for San Fransisco, but do keep one thing in mind; I’m doing without the iPhone app because…wait for it…I don’t have one! Yes! I’m a Blackberry user, and Apple is the only phone manufacturer not ignored which if you look at the included chart, you will understand why only an iPhone app and nothing for any other smartphone is indeed a bad idea.
Apple doesn’t even appear in the top 5, according to IDC, it gets lumped in with ‘others’, the app being little but a nod to trendiness. Maybe I’m not getting the whole experience because I lack an iPhone, I don’t know, but Placepop gives me the picture of form coming over function. The site is presented fairly well but is ultimately crippled by trying to do too much. If you want a generic ‘here I am’ site, the give it a try, it’s free at any rate.
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