Search The Web

Custom Search

Sunday 4 October 2009

Upgrades?

Why is it that whenever a website, or application decides to "upgrade" their product, they usually manage to end up making a mess of things? It never ceases to amaze me how often this type of thing happens.
You would have thought that any site would fully test these so called "upgrades" thoroughly before unleashing them onto an often, unsuspecting, public.
I can think of numerous examples when this has happened to me in recent months. Blip.fm. DailyBooth, Facebook & YouTube all spring to mind when i think of recent failed upgrades. DailyBooth has got so slow & unrealiable that i hardly ever bother using it anymore. I doubt that this is the kind of reaction they were looking for when they planned their "upgrade". But, it's a common effect of their errors. I am by no means the only person who is having these problems & complaining about them. I wonder how many others have voted with their mouse & gone over to another service?
Although i've mentioned DailyBooth as an example. Surely the king, queen & complete royal family of botched "upgrades" has to be YouTube. They win hands down.
Without fail, when they perform an "upgrade" the service afterwards is always worse. Recently this has meant that viewers are not seeing the videos of people they subscribe to. Some subscriptions seem to disappear completely, often without the viewer realising until some time afterwards & now the comment system seems to be broken, once again.
YouTube fail to realise, or fail to care, that the comment system is one of the best things about the site & is one of the features that got the site where it is now. It provides interaction amongst it's users & brings people back to the site, day after day. All of those repeated hits are more potential ad revenue for YouTube & by all accounts they could certainly do with the money!
Internet sites, especially Social Networking sites, really need to wake up & realise that without us, the users, they are dead in the water. If you were a supermarket, or somebody trying to sell a product would you treat people in the same way? I doubt it, because you know that they would just go elsewhere & tell all of their friends to do so as well.
Maybe this is one of the problems here? Is there really a realistic alternative to a site like YouTube, Facebook etc? Not really & not unless you want to go to a "lesser" site & start all over again & how many of us would really want to do that?
So, i guess our only hope is that these sites do actually wake up & realise what they are doing & the frustrations that this causes their users & customers.
You never know, one day somebody may come up with a viable alternative.

3 comments:

  1. One thing we don't hear about is what the turnover at the site is. I wonder sometimes, especially when I see things like this repeat themselves, if it's a case of current employees not being aware of what previous employees already learned the hard way. For all we know, there could very well be a rapidly spinning revolving door at those offices.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Amazing how certain mistakes get repeated - such as the break-down of the comment system, and the internal email system which has never worked properly since November 2006.

    As Curt says in his comment, emplyee turnover could be a part of it. I believe that Big Joe and Mia are each gone, I'm sure others who knew us when are also no longer there, but can any of us name any of the current community staff?

    But what I kept waiting for you to mention was the absurdity of the new stalking feature: Follow somebody's every move, not just sub to their videos. Another "brilliant" example of the engineers coming up with the features instead of those who [in theory at least] have their fingers on the pulse of the community.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Andy I dont think they care about the individual but the group as a whole. I think that seems to be their focus and if something they do effects us as an individual "upgrades, changes etc" they dont really care but let a group complain and then you will see something happen. However that doesnt apply to youtube I dont think. LOL! Great post!

    ReplyDelete