One thing I was really excited about with Five Weeks to a Social Library was playing around with Odeo. I’d seen a lot of people using it and it looked like a really great service. I love their cute embedded players. Unfortunately, I seem to have come to it at the point where things are falling apart over there. Odeo has been having weird outages where none of us can access the audio. The embedded player will give an error message and when you try to click through to the Odeo page for the podcast, you get this screen (?!?!?? it’s not exactly descriptive of what the problem is and it kind of makes you feel like it’s your fault). Then five minutes later it will work fine. And five minutes after that, it won’t. Then I tried to upload one presenter’s MP3 file, it uploaded, but I got an error message every time I tried to play it. Not cool, especially not in a class like this where we’re trying to make people excited about social software. How many negative experiences does it take for a newbie to be turned off to something? đ
So I’m moving all of the audio content over to blip.tv, which is where some of our video content for the course is already living. With all the hubbub (deserved, yes) over YouTube, I had not discovered blip.tv until recently. YouTube really doesn’t allow you to display screencasts in a way that people can easily make out what’s on the screen, so I had thought that there was nowhere for me to host the screencasts for 5 Weeks other than my own server (which was a scary thought considering bandwidth issues). I was happy to find that blip.tv works beautifully with (most) screencasts and has a full-screen option for viewing. Hot! They also take audio files and allow you to embed a player on your Website. I’m really impressed with blip.tv and am glad that we will be using it for this course. You can see our “show” at blip.tv here.
I guess this is a good lesson for our participants: always have a backup plan, because with these Web 2.0 companies, you never know what might happen. Perpetual beta can mean “we’re constantly improving things” or it can mean “never having to say you’re sorry.”
It is a good lesson, and in that context it’s worth mentioning the several Skype conference calls we tried, how they failed miserably, and how we successfully used IM chat as a fallback.
I wonder sometimes if a major difference between those of us who get along fairly well with technology and those who don’t is how deeply we personalize tech problems. If you assume you did something wrong when something falls down and goes boom, you’re not going to experiment and you’re not going to learn, because you’re too afraid that boom means the end.
Whereas I (for example) cuss a bit, mess around to see if I can make it better, and shrug and solve the problem some other way if I can’t. Stuff breaks, that’s life; the thing to do is cope. If we get THAT lesson across in Five Weeks, we’re doing very well indeed.
I noticed you said blip.tv works well with *most* screencasts. Please shoot me an email so we can figure out how to make it work with *all* of your screencasts.
Yours,
Eric
Eric Mortensen
Director of Content
eric/a+/blip.tv
Odeo’s support has been discontinued for a while now, from what I understand.
“The embedded player will give an error message and when you try to click through to the Odeo page for the podcast, you get this screen (?!?!?? itâs not exactly descriptive of what the problem is and it kind of makes you feel like itâs your fault)… How many negative experiences does it take for a newbie to be turned off to something?”
This “error message” is another one of those cases of developers too witty for their own good (or more accurately, thinking they’re wittier than they are). And yes, while perpetual beta is all well and good, some of these services have been out there long enough that “perpetual beta” sometimes sounds more like an excuse so they don’t have to bother to make the thing work properly. Which is fine, we don’t have to bother to use their services either…
And what you said Dorthea–it takes a certain level of confidence in one’s skills to navigate the morass of half-baked, semi-stable services out there. We have the confidence (and the patience), but how many non-geeks will put up with that level of instability?
Apologies if i post this twice, but here goes…
Meredith: “…when you try to click through to the Odeo page for the podcast, you get this screen (?!?!?? itâs not exactly descriptive of what the problem is and it kind of makes you feel like itâs your fault)….How many negative experiences does it take for a newbie to be turned off to something?”
Only too true. I’m especially irked at that error message–I’m sure it was some software developer’s half-baked attempt at wit*, but it comes off as condescending (perhaps even insulting?) to customers. And I admit I never took a marketing class in my life…but is that really the last taste you want to leave in an already-frustrated user’s mouth?
Dorthea: Resilience helps, and a lot of that resilience only comes with experience. I have those types of web 2.0 toys crap out on me often enough that I know it’s their fault, not mine. In fact, lately I’ve started wondering if some of this “permanent beta” business has just become this week’s trendy excuse for not bothering to make the site work properly before you launch it…that sort of behavior is certainly within those sites’ rights, but I’m also perfectly happy to do what Meredith’s doing and take my business to the competition.