Changing Looks
Both Upcoming.org and MyOpenID.com recently changed their look. In the MyOpenID case it was a logical case of first design replacement. Their first design simply had no own branding and it made the site sometimes look a bit “shifty”.
The reasons for changing the looks of Upcoming where numerous. First of all Yahoo is slowly enforcing all the sites they bought to adopt their own login (for which you need yahoo email address, why would I ever need a yahoo email address?). They also did this recently with Flickr which caused much annoyance with the “Old Skool” user base who didn’t like this new login mostly because the Yahoo presence never added something to the value of Flickr.
Somehow this had an effect on Yahoo as they tried to accompany the Upcoming change with some goodies for the loyal users. A free t-shirt for all their USA and Canada users was offered to keep the crowd at ease, neglecting their big usebase in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands and China. I find this so strange as FON recently send me a free router as a thank you for being one of their first users back when they were still using plain old Linkys WRT routers.
Luckily Yahoo did try to add some value to Upcoming. The new look is much better in my opinion, and the new integration with Yahoo maps and Flickr is very cool. I don’t get though why they had to drop the .org URL (the site is now located at http://upcoming.yahoo.com) as I never think of a non-profit organization when I see a .org domain. In the end I wonder how long before I also need a Yahoo ID to login to del.icio.us.
alper http://alper.nl
April 22nd, 2007Yeah, Cris. I was also preparing a piece about the Upcoming.org transition (Katie seems to be happy with it) which I’ll tack on here.
The goodie page really ticked me off as the Flickr screenshot testifies. Let me explain.
I’ve been an enthusiastic en evangelical Upcoming.org user for a while now and have added tons of events around Delft and in the rest of the Netherlands. I have also convinced my friends to register.
I was surprised that they suddenly recognized me. I clicked the button for the shirt only to be deeply disappointed. Imagine someone waving something in front of you, only to give it to someone else. That’s the feeling I got.
I understand the reasoning in part but it’s not the quantity of shirts you hand out, it’s the message you deliver.
The web is global and that makes internationalization serious business. Usage from the rest of the world is dwarfing America until it becomes completely insignificant. Simultaneously startups from outside of America are also increasing in number and size.
So the question is: Do you want to stay on your island or be part of a global web?
Cristiano Betta http://www.ibbydibby.com/
April 22nd, 2007I was amazed that they did this. At first I wanted to get some nice stats of the amount of people/events outside the US on Upcoming so that I could present a nice %, but this was fairly hard. But when you think about it: they could have done some IP checking and never offer you the t-shirt in the first place.
In the end I obviously think it would’t have been that hard or expensive to just also send to the rest of the world, as both Jaiku and FON recently proved to me.