Squidoo? Why??
After an initial pointer from Bob Walsh, over at the Joel On Software discussion board, and a follow-up blog posting from him I recently went and checked out Squidoo and played around with it a bit. In case you haven’t heard of it yet, Squidoo is a knowledge sharing portal which allows “lensmasters” to create “lenses” — pages of information about things they know about (or claim to know about). Squidoo’s tagline is “Everybody’s an expert on something”. I put together my own lens, on something think I know about, and fiddled around with the modules.
Somehow, I was extremely underwhelmed. The site editing, inside the Web browser, AJAX-style, feels sluggish and unresponsive and not “fun” enough. I don’t feel that I have much control over the site, page layout, page contents (just as a small f’rinstance, I added a picture to my lens, which shows up fine in the editing view but is simply not there in the published lens). The available modules that can be arranged in the lens and populated with content based on the module type (e.g. Amazon links for the Amazon module) all seem more or less geared towards traffic generation and revenue generation (think AdWords and Amazon Partner Network) rather than true information sharing. As a result, the lenses I’ve looked at don’t have much of a ‘networked’ feel to them. This, coupled with the fact that the whole site itself feels too sluggish and slow doesn’t really tempt me to explore. Which brings me to my original question: WHY would I, as a viewer, want to go to Squidoo to look for stuff? And if there is no viewing audience, why bother to post there in the first place?
Maybe I didn’t give it enough of a chance, but I failed to see the point of yet another site for people disseminating information about something they care about. If they’re afficionados, they’ll probably have their own sites, blogs, etc. and I’ll find them through the conventional paths, if it’s a topic I’m interested in anyway. If they’re real experts in something, they could contribute all their knowledge to Wikipedia. The lenses I’ve looked at tended to be collections of links for the lens topic. Unfortunately, since there appears to be no discussion or feedback going on, these link collections aren’t social bookmarks or anything similar. They’re just one guy’s link collection. In a way, this is my main criticism: There’s no social interchange or multilateral communication going on in the lenses. It’s like looking at one person’s school essay, only now with included http links. If you build a knowledge-sharing site, you need to make it ‘fun’ for either the producer or the consumer (ideally, both). If you don’t (this is purely from my own experience), there’s not much point. If there’s no additional ‘kick’ — such as Wikipedia adding the kick of working together with a world-wide community on preserving the world’s knowledge — then you won’t pull people over from other sites/portals/blogs/whatever. What is the problem that Squidoo solves?
I probably missed the main point. Can someone enlighten me?
Technorati Tags: Squidoo, Information, Communities
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March 7th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Curious: After uploading your photo, did you Publish your lens? If you haven’t, changes won’t show up in the live, published page. They will, however, show up in the edit view.
March 8th, 2006 at 6:14 am
Yes, I did. I published it several times, deleted the photo, re-uploaded it, changed the scale of the photo, uploaded again, published, etc.
Maybe there’s a size restriction I’m not aware of?
March 8th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
thanks for trying it out, Daniel.
I have three answers as to why you’d want to use Squidoo:
1. the world needs a lens about your blog. Your best posts. A place to start if I just found out about you. You could even list your favorite books, etc., as a service to those that admire your opinions.
2. Do a google search to try to compare skype with net2phone. You’ll find tons and tons of matches, but not one useful page (at least I didn’t.) But if someone built a lens on this, the answer would be right there.
3. Which leads to the proximity effect. Each lens is generating traffic… some have a lot. The net effect is that more people visit squidoo every day than gm.com or ford.com. If someone wants to put in the effort to customize and maintain a blog, more power to them. For everyone else, though, it feels like Squidoo offers a chance to stake a tiny piece of cyberspace, for free.
One last thing: 15 weeks after blogging started, blogs were pretty bad. I think our lensmasters are doing some great work given how young our site is.
March 8th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
Seth - thanks for your answers. (Wow! The man himself - hang on, I’m just having a moment… OK. Done.)
Ad 1 - What good would a lens about me be? And there’s already a site with my best posts — It’s here. No, actually that’s not true. This blog doesn’t give you my publication list, my Ph.D. thesis, my CV, etc. So perhaps there IS a need for a lens about lil’ ol’ me. Though I doubt it.
Ad 2 - But on the Web I’ll hopefully find infos from sources I trust, e.g. reputable magazines. Not just someone who “claimed” squidoo.com/trustmeimaprofessional Also, with a wealth of sources I can try and get a “fair and balanced” overview [albeit we both know that that’s probably not the case, since too much information is just as bad as none at all].
Ad 3 - Here, in a way, I agree. We currently have a lot of distributed content being produced on dispersed sites. And we have the aggregators - your digg, slashdot, reddit, whatever. We have a lot of regurgitatiing, reblogging, digging, bookmarking, etc. The only other place I can think of where new and interesting content is developed by a large community of people is the one I mentioned - Wikipedia. (I don’t buy the “for free” part, though — blogger.com is free, so is Yahoo 360 and a whole host of others more).
All the technical squabbles aside, I think my main cristicism is that Squidoo doesn’t feel like a community effort. It feels like a school science fair, with a single nerd sitting in each booth with his pet beetles under a magnifying lens or with his collection of soda bottle tops. That, and the fact that Squidoo doesn’t tempt me to explore. So my TWO main criticisms are … (Google for “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition” for the logical conclusion to this paragraph).
So perhaps you can find a way to strengthen the community aspect — maybe with hosted discussion forums, a comments or feedback component? Also - there’s not always the one truth. So where would I go if I have a dissenting opinion about something? Somebody claims squidoo.com/daniels_an_idiot and fills it with lots of information about why I’m an idiot. I can set up a parallel lens squidoo.com/no_im_not but unless he links it in his “related lenses” (which he probably won’t, since he thinks I’m an idiot anyway), how would people find my counter-arguments?
June 15th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
I had a problem uploading images too. Today The images wouldnt show up for me in after uploading, posting saving or anything. Very frusterating. It makes me want to give up on this stupid site.