As mentioned on AppScout and TechCrunch, Yappd is a Twitter like service which gives users the additional privilege of posting an image along with their Yappd message. Lets take a tour of this service to see if it’s the new Twitter.
Synopses:
Yappd is a brand new company founded by three individuals, Brendan Lim, Brent Collier, and Andrew Tilt. The two founders, Brendan and Brent, both are Software Engineers that decided that it was important to let your friends quickly see what you’re doing. Also, to develop it quickly, the two founders decided to develop Yappd using Ruby on Rails.
Signing Onto The Bandwagon:
The signup process for Yappd is fairly straightforward. What is required to create an account? A first name, last name, preferred username, email address, and preferred password. The standard mojo.
Using Yappd:
Once you log into your Yappd account, the first thing you’ll most likely notice is the Twitter/Jaiku like text area where you can type in your message. Notice how many characters Yappd gives you, 150. Thats right, 10 more characters than what those other guys offer to help you get your point across!
Your watch list, or what is more commonly known as your friends list, is located on the left hand side of your user page. Once you add someone to your watch list, you can watch what they Yapp about from your user account page. One of these days, one of these services are going to use the word STALK as a way to add and monitor friends. At any rate, the Yappd layout is pretty similar to Twitter and Jaiku as all three use Tabs as a way to distinguish between your own messages, your friends messages, and all messages.
Yappd provides a few different ways of posting messages. You can either yapp by email, website, or phone. If you want to yapp by phone, all you have to do is send a text or picture message to yapp@yappd.com. Your yapp will be posted within 1-2 minutes. You can yapp by e-mail the very same way you yapp by phone. Just shoot off your yapps to yapp@yappd.com. Your yapp will be posted within 1-2 minutes. What about the cost, associated with using your phone to yapp? Yappd does not charge you any fee to yapp by phone. You will, however, get charged, the normal rate for a text or picture message from your mobile phone carrier.
A feature almost not worth mentioning is the REMIND ME feature, which if enabled in your privacy settings allows other Yappd users to essentially poke you. This feature is suppose to remind users that they haven’t Yappd in awhile. This small feature reminds me of the POKEing going on in the world of Facebook, just on a smaller scale. I’m glad that Yappd decided to make this a user enabled or disabled feature as I’m sure most folks would not have to be reminded that they are neglecting to Yapp.
Now, I realize the title for this article highlights the fact that in some way shape or form, you can add images to your Yapp messages. I have to admit, I can’t figure out how to perform this function of the service. I have sent an email, asking their support team how this feature works and how it’s defined. I am beginning to think that you can only add images to your Yapp account through a camera enabled mobile phone but until they reply to my email, it’s anyones guess. I tried visiting their HELP section but honestly, it didn’t really HELP me.
Conclusion – Final Thoughts
With Twitter and Jaiku being considered established leaders within their niche (micro-blogging) , I am pretty disappointed to see a service such as Yappd come online without at least, if not more, functionality and features than their competition. I don’t understand why companies who want to enter this space don’t end up taking what’s already available and taking it to the next level. Instead, these companies come online and they look like barebone versions of their competition.
Yappd, has no way of allowing you to direct message your friends, doesn’t have an XML or RSS feed of your own messages, no way to customize the look of your Yappd page, no way to embed your Yappd status or messages into your blog or some other website, no clear concise documentation which would really make the help section, the HELP section and is missing even more features from both Jaiku, Twitter and Pownce that I care to mention.
This is the kind of crap that gives credence to the ongoing debate on whether or not, we are in a Web 2.0 bubble. I will withhold my thoughts and feelings as that is another blog post for another day, but if any of you Yappd guys read this, please as soon as possible, make your site something worth switching too. I’d love to see a blog post from Yappd that explains their vision and where they plan on taking this service as I’ve already seen one of their employees Yapp about how they plan to be around for the long term. I’m sorry, but unless you guys do something revolutionary or at the very least ‘catch up’ there won’t be a long term.
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