New fun project

[DevSign]

Hey all, I've been working on a fun new project these past few weeks (when I have nothing to do) and although it's still a work in progress and still needs a lot of tweaking, I would like some feedback from you all.

It's just a demo url at this moment, but go and register, look around and I would greatly appreciate some feedback and ideas.

One's you've registered and have logged in, search for me on the site "christopher". Add me and I'll be your first contact.

Looking forward to getting some feedback.

http://imsocial.netne.net

Cheers

 

[SuperNev]

Just looked at the home page now, haven't registered for anything. I have a few points, which I think might be valid

1. The only thing that I get about the home page is that it's something to do with a social network ... The last 3 or so networks that I joined, I ended up not having any friends, so I (and prolly other people out there) am very skeptical on joining more networks.
- My point is that you haven't yet described what imSocial does

2. Data is a commodity, more so these days when so much data is being moved around. Data about myself has become much more important to me (sharing my name, email, and even password considering that at some point most people start recycling passwords). My question is; why should I give you my personal information when there's things like oAuth?
- My point here is that you should either make it easy for me to join in (by using popular providers), or make your site so appealing that I go "Oh my fracking gosh! That's genius! Here, take my personal info!" lol

Anyways, I could go on, but most people say I tend to sound negative Valid points though, perhaps you could spend some time working on those.

On the positive, I like how clean the site is, design has really moved to be the less unnecessary-graphic type, which I personally like.

 

[DevSign]

Hey SuperNav, thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

well, as I said, it's a side project at this moment, I'm also registered on many Social Networks, and yeah, when I first started Facebooking I enjoyed how simple and clean it was. Now I'm irritated with all the ads and fake posts that pretend to be me.

So that's when I decided to code my own network, it's not for me to use your email to spam you, I won't even know what to send

To oAuth, as I said, this is project where I code absolutely everything from scratch, no help from precoded packages or any framework that make coding a breeze.

Ah, I see what you mean about making signing up easier, but yeah this is just a project I'm building for myself to enjoy or anyone else. So I'm not interested in making it possible to use your facebook or Google+ account to signup.

In terms of usability, no ads or spam will be allowed, so that's what I'm aiming for and like you said, a much cleaner, friendlier user experience.

But yeah, thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated.

Cheers

 

[fragtion]

1. The only thing that I get about the home page is that it's something to do with a social network ... The last 3 or so networks that I joined, I ended up not having any friends, so I (and prolly other people out there) am very skeptical on joining more networks.
- My point is that you haven't yet described what imSocial does

2. Data is a commodity, more so these days when so much data is being moved around. Data about myself has become much more important to me (sharing my name, email, and even password considering that at some point most people start recycling passwords). My question is; why should I give you my personal information when there's things like oAuth?
- My point here is that you should either make it easy for me to join in (by using popular providers), or make your site so appealing that I go "Oh my fracking gosh! That's genius! Here, take my personal info!" lol

+1. Cool effort -- but (excuse me for being blunt - just honest) ambiguous, bland, redundant. Unmotivated to register without good reason. I like simple colours when it comes to web dev, especially greys, but the logo strikes me as too simple and bland too - needs some colour or a 'trade-mark' image to go with it that's easy to identify/isolate/remember. You might argue that facebook didn't use an image, but the difference is that their logo uses a distinct type-setting/font and colour scheme/style that everyone finds easy to recognize. Hope you find this useful. Awesome work if you coded it all yourself - now you've got the experience, so take that to the next level and be creative and use that experience to build something unique that people would find useful =) Nobody wants another social networking site. I'm trying to move to Google+ as it is (and right now I reasonably think that Google will satisfy my needs best in the long run, ie vs facebook)

 

[DevSign]

here's a mix of screenshots

 

[SuperNev]

Hey SuperNav, thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

well, as I said, it's a side project at this moment, I'm also registered on many Social Networks, and yeah, when I first started Facebooking I enjoyed how simple and clean it was. Now I'm irritated with all the ads and fake posts that pretend to be me.

So that's when I decided to code my own network, it's not for me to use your email to spam you, I won't even know what to send

To oAuth, as I said, this is project where I code absolutely everything from scratch, no help from precoded packages or any framework that make coding a breeze.

Ah, I see what you mean about making signing up easier, but yeah this is just a project I'm building for myself to enjoy or anyone else. So I'm not interested in making it possible to use your facebook or Google+ account to signup.

In terms of usability, no ads or spam will be allowed, so that's what I'm aiming for and like you said, a much cleaner, friendlier user experience.

But yeah, thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated.

Cheers

I do understand that. I was not posting with the intention of saying that you'd use user data to spam them
The reality is that privacy is an issue. Connected apps have traction because of the oAuth or whatever model.

Your point is good, that you want to create something for yourself, or anyone else who wants to enjoy it. Try this out: run it with a traditional login form only, and after a while add a Facebook/Google+ method and see what happens.
Such will also make friend discovery easy, which is important when you join something where you don't know anyone. Remember blueworld.co.za? When I first joined it, it was hella difficult to find people I knew, nowadays it's not. I'm just saying consider using those means.

I saw that you said it's a spare time thing, but implementing the above should take you 2 days or so.

Only when you posted the screenshot did I see something more appealing that I would want to join in to see. Give users a sneak-peak into it.

When I went on to Instagram for the first time I was disappointed that there were no pictures on the home page to show what it is about, but because I knew what it was, I signed up either way.
Over the past few weeks I have seen popular entrepreneurs come up with start-ups, whose websites were vague. I just closed the page after looking at the homepage cos I couldn't see what value there is in spending 2 minutes filling out a form. bluntly, that's what I thought about when I saw imSocial.

 

[SuperNev]

+1. Cool effort -- but (excuse me for being blunt - just honest) ambiguous, bland, redundant. Unmotivated to register without good reason. I like simple colours when it comes to web dev, especially greys, but the logo strikes me as too simple and bland too - needs some colour or a 'trade-mark' image to go with it that's easy to identify/isolate/remember. You might argue that facebook didn't use an image, but the difference is that their logo uses a distinct type-setting/font and colour scheme/style that everyone finds easy to recognize. Hope you find this useful. Awesome work if you coded it all yourself - now you've got the experience, so take that to the next level and be creative and use that experience to build something unique that people would find useful =) Nobody wants another social networking site. I'm trying to move to Google+ as it is (and right now I reasonably think that Google will satisfy my needs best in the long run, ie vs facebook)

I agree on Google+. I was gonna post a whole discussion on G+, but I think this is not the platform.

@DevSign, I know you're asking for feedback prolly from a development point of view, but remember that it's normally the 'normal' users who use your service (unless you're GitHub ). So after you get all the feedback, write it on a page and start thinking of what you think makes sense, and what you think doesn't.

I launched a beta of a taxi route planning service a few months back. The concept is good, but because I don't yet have a lot of data, most people found it unusable. I spent a lot of time making the algorithms work, manipulating data, but ended up not focusing on what the 'user' would want to see; directions from A to B, accurate and well-presented.

In your case I as an 'user' want to see why I should join your network.

- Is it so I can share pictures? (I can do that almost everywhere)
- Is it to communicate with close friends without all the noise of randoms with those silly profile view count spam? (I have privacy controls, or things like Path.com)

We can write the best books, but if we don't catch the user with something on the cover, they might never read the books.