Woome now works with my camera setup, so I ventured online to host and participate in a few sessions. All week I’ve been getting emails from 21 year old women wanting to get to know me better.
First I am greeted with this image.
Ok, it’s beta, no big deal.
I set up a session, “post hottub relaxation.” I just got done doing power yoga and went tubbing afterwards, so it’s a realistic title.
Searching for people to invite. Can’t search for people from invite me page. Must click through 15+ pages of people to select who you want to invite.
Why is the specified orientation either girl meets guy or anyone meets anyone? I’m a guy, why can’t it be guy meets girl? Confusing.
Ok, my session is about to begin. This is exciting! The chance to meet three other random people from around the world. I wonder who’s going to show up? The cute brunette from Des Moines, maybe the fetching lass from Manchester (mostly UK people on Woome).
Turns out nobody showed up for my session. How depressing is that? You have to invite a lot more people than you expect to participate. Most people never show up. Spam random 10 people and see what happens. If I was a 21 year old woman I think the experience would be quite different.
Buck up young man, this is the wild frontier of cyberspace. I decide to create another session. Maybe people were turned off by the hot tub reference.
I try again, with a slightly better name for the session: Windy Sunday Hangout. Turns out I had to verify my email address. While I was taking care of that my session started. You can’t join a session while it’s in progress.
I’m zero for two. My fault. Here’s where I would like it to be more like SpeedDate, where the session starts automatically. Woome has to find the medium-ground here.
It’s weird that I can invite people to other sessions that I’m not participating in. With only two guys per session, getting in on one can be difficult.
You can invite people from Facebook.
The only way to guarantee you’ll be in a session is to host one.
It feels weird to invite guys to a session.
The user interface, nice at is it, needs work. Menu items expand to hide other menu items.
Woo credits. Unlimited for users while in beta, this is how they will make money. Charge per session. I would guess that hosts will pay, not attendees, but I could be wrong.
All my pictures are cropped badly. My face doesn’t even show up in several. What’s up with that? Auto-cropping is easy, there is plenty of software to do this. Off to iPhoto to select some new photos. Why isn’t this linked to my Flickr account? Make more work for me when they should make it easy to connect to photo sharing sites.
I was able to get into a session called “I’m a freak thats dope!!!” You take what you can get with Woome.
Cue the funky startup music. Oops, “looks like there’s no one for you to WOO in this session.” I guess that means that no women showed up. Depressing. Why do we need to have unisex rooms?
I gave Woome another shot and it didn’t work out so well. I’ll try again when it’s night-time here in the US, perhaps I’ll have better luck.
My woo address is http://woome.com/relaxedguy if you want to check it out together.
