An Open Letter To Glogster
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Dear Glogster,
You have forced me to use Scrapblog purely out of necessity and these are my three reasons why:
1# – In order to share photos and videos with my DP on a Glog page, I have to upload them all first.
Every time. I can’t reference links or embed code from other sites.
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Scrapblog doesn’t feel as intuitive to use and certainly isn’t as pretty as you are (users just seem cooler on Glogster), but at least Scrapblog offers easy access to existing photo sites like Flickr and to YouTube videos. According to your G-Lab section, YouTube video sharing is 60% on it’s way but…
Why not be a step ahead? Until you, Glogster, offer the ability to use links and video from ANY SITE I WANT, I am not going to bother with you. I will have to accumulate G Points in my life in some other way.
I should point out that I am not completely dismissing you as a creative resource, Glogster. Teachers are excited about your educational possibilities. Meanwhile, young people on Glogster are making their own versions of ads/splash pages for products that they love. They are generating free advertising for companies in a way that speaks directly to their friends and peers. This is amazing. They are literally doing a buttload of free advertising for companies in a way that is potentially profitable on so many levels.
Glogster, I am suprised that you already have such a diverse user base who are consistently creating cool Glogster pages, despite the fact that they are so restricted in how they share content. I guess young people have more patience than I do. I REFUSE to upload video that I am temporarily referencing and may wish to remove or move around at will.
#2 – Why limit folks to only using one page?
Why can’t we design multiple-page creations? Why the limiting “poster” format? This is another area where Scrapblog has got you beat. Users could create amazing/interactive online graphic novels and other media if they were able to. But they can’t. They are stuck with one giant, ridiculous page.
3# – No easy embed size controls and tweaking the code results in the following weirdness: (display difficulties and loss of user info)
So Glogster, until you fix these three issues, you will never know the creative genius that I could be contributing to your community. Tis a shame.
I will, however, be checking out your content from time to time because a lot of the Glogster pages are pretty sweet.
~ Daniela
Other Glogster reviews:
CraftGossip – December 26, 2007
TechCrunch – December 29, 2007
Webware: January 4, 2008
ShinyShiny – February 6, 2008
Image sources: (thanks!)