This is the first minute I’ve had to come up for air in several days. I’m trying to set up my profile for the Virtual Social Networking and Dating Conference tomorrow.
I’ll have chat open and my webcam on if anyone wants to say hi, although I’ll have to keep conversations brief. My Profile. I’m covering some of the day for client TelTech systems, which is a iDate Bronze sponsor. Do we even call it iDate this year, or the Social Networking Conference (you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!)
Pringo Networks is powering the event. So far my experience setting up profiles and using the site have been so-so. Broken email communications, problems with usernames, redundant emails and four separate messages in their Virtual conference have marred the experience.
The virtual conference site they set up is fair. Profile setup could be more intuitive, there are no tool tips for features and you basically have to click around for 20 minutes to get your profile ready for action. For example: profiles are configured in the My Settings tab instead of My Profile, confusing.
Timing and schedules are a problem as well. A 12 hour event and no easy built-in way to schedule people to cover their timeslot. Twelve hours long is too long. Make it four hours in the middle of the day to catch west coast and Europe.
Looks like Userplane is powering the chat and video portion of the site. We know that will work.
I added a bunch of photos and the photo editor crashed Firefox. Now I can’t find the crop feature in the Edit menu except for your thumbnail-sized avatar. A good User Experience guru could improve the site 200% in a few hours.
For a service that’s been around since 2003 I would have expected a lot more polish, but at least it works and I’m ready for tomorrow.
Update: Pringo staff are being very responsive to my requests. There are several broken links to Bronze and other sponsors in Mac browsers. Gallery photos were cropped by the system in weird way and the Facebook and Youtube importer are not working.
