revisiting imeem

I must have bookmarked the social networking plus instant messaging site imeem in my sleep a while back, because even though it didn’t end up in my del.icio.us catalog, I recognized the site name when Jason added me as his imeem friend today.

Am I speaking jibberish yet? Let’s start over.

A few years ago, I drove my friends insane with the first tier of social networking websites, mainly the Friendster/Tribe/Orkut triptych. Back then, I knew that I’d forget to check these sites regularly for new messages — because I hate websites that prod me via email to check my site-specific mailbox — and so instant messaging integration was the natural next step.

imeem attempts to tackle the notification issue with its own IM client, which is fine, but needs immediate improvement in the following areas:

  • punctuation marks should not show up as HTML entities (' in particular is driving me crazy)
  • tabbed windows, made de rigueur by Firefox and Trillian
  • the ability to consolidate contacts with more than one IM account into “metacontacts” (term ganked from Trillian)

I am also skeptical of any website incorporating music, video, and photo sharing without clear statements of copyright. O, yes, it’s all there in the Terms of Service, but if it’s too easy for me to upload files, I won’t be paying much attention to whether or not I should be uploading them in the first place. I realize that “should be” is quite nebulous, but I’d rather not be the test dummy for making it less so.

A second pass at the music section of imeem allowed me to discover an original electronica composition from an imeem user that’s rather good. This I could see as an excellent way for independent musicians to get their music out there. (Yes, I’m aware of MySpace, but its taxonomy is so bad as to be nonexistent. You have to know just what you’re looking for there to get it, which doesn’t help independent musicians much.)

The site itself is clean and light and loads quickly. It would do well to incorporate some clear taxonomy in the navigation; sticking everything under “channel” or “tag” is vague and unhelpful. Plus, how useful is the 5-star rating metaphor, if one is allowed to qualify an opinion with comments? I have a similar gripe with Yelp — we shouldn’t try to distill an experience into a number of stars when well-written reviews do just fine. Riffs and Consumating are even more annoying, with their ability to “thumbs-down” human beings. Anyone remember slambooks? Were they good at determining anything other than how needlessly mean kids could be to each other?

Anyway, imeem doesn’t do photo sharing better than Flickr, it doesn’t do interest groups better than Tribe, and it doesn’t do all-in-one instant messaging clients better than Trillian (or Adium for the Mac), so I have no compelling reason to use it yet. It’s headed in the right direction, but I wonder if it can do so fast enough to combat social networking entropy.

About Halsted M. Bernard

Halsted, a/k/a cygnoir, does stuff with words. Her favourite things to do with words are keeping this diary, writing stories, and organising information. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband, two cats, a few gadgets, several fountain pens, and many books.

Posted on 26 Jun 2006 in Linklog
  • http://pixiepurls.com pixie

    I love adium, the quack noise always scares jesse hehe.

  • http://quasistoic.org/ Danny Dawson

    About your gripe with Yelp and the star-rating system: Let’s say you have 20 minutes before you need to leave your house to pick up the MSG and take him out to a sushi dinner, and you promised him you’d take him to a new restaurant you’d never been to.

    Yelp lists 125 sushi restaurants near you, most of which have a few dozen reviews. On the search results page, each restaurant shows its average star rating and a snippet of a single review. (e.g. “I am editing my original review of this restaurant which was based on my first…” and “Back when I lived in Alameda, I avoided this place because I had heard it wasn’t…” – taken from real reviews)

    Given review snippets like that, how do you decide which of the 125 sushi spots merits any investigation further than the search results page? You order by average rating, that’s how. At least I do.

    You don’t have time to read a handful of reviews about each of the 125. There’s just too many. If you’re not filtering by star rating, what would you do?

  • http://www.cygnoir.net cygnoir

    Danny, compare the five-star rating attached to this actual review: \”Yummy!!!!!!! I sleep out front so when they open I don\’t have to wait. The best sushi I have ever had and the staff are always smiling.\”

    With the one attached to the beginning of this one: \”The Best Sushi I Have Ever Had. Consistently. So yes, if you get there more than half an hour after they open, you can expect to wait anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours, but what do you expect? They only have two tables and a handful of bar seats….\” (yes, I used yours)

    I would say the latter had actual content I could base a decision on, while the former was almost completely content-free. This was my original point; I did not say that stars were meaningless, but I did question their efficacy over well-written reviews.

    You asked me how I\’d sort the search results page if I had only 20 minutes to plan a dinner at a brand-new restaurant. Due to the time constraint, I\’d be more concerned with location than ratings, which is not to say I\’d go to a lower-rated restaurant over a higher-rated one just because it was a mile closer. But I would give a lower-rated restaurant higher priority because of location.

    Star ratings may have their place, but without further context they are meaningless to me.

  • http://quasistoic.org/ Danny Dawson

    By no means do I think that rating systems should replace good reviews, but I really do feel they’re a necessary complement. As a website like Yelp grows to encompass more and more restaurants and businesses in a given city, I don’t feel that either the rating system nor the review system can remain useful if they stand alone.

    I think that when it comes to review sites, Yelp stands at the forefront of usability.

    There are websites that let you “thumbs down” other people? That’s disgusting.

  • http://www.cygnoir.net cygnoir

    You’ve answered my original question, so now I know why five-star ratings are useful in conjunction with well-written reviews. I still maintain that they are significantly less useful when attached to contentless reviews. My bias is that many Yelp reviews are too focused on being clever or funny, and this is to the detriment of the entire reviewing system. It then becomes more of a popularity contest.

    Do you prefer Yelp over Citysearch? If so, would you articulate why?

    Thanks for this discussion; I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am.