Zude Offers New Technology in Social Networking - Using the Guide
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It’s worth noting that none of the links for the Zude guide will work unless you have pop-ups enabled for the page. In fact, the whole site is addicted to pop-ups; if you don’t like pop-ups, you’re going to be thoroughly annoyed. On the other hand, many of these pop-ups are fairly useful, so it's best just to think of it as how they chose to do their interface.
The link that is supposed to introduce you to Zude takes you to a video (no audio, not even music) that goes by so fast I had to replay it a couple of times to understand what it was presenting. It showed how a user could grab a user profile, choose a background, then choose other items (such as audio) and even search Google for other images and such to put on their profile.
The navigation guide was a little more useful. In about five screens, it leads the user through the items typically found on Zude. You can mouse over each item to pop up a tooltip that helpfully explains what it is and what it does. There are a lot of clickable items in the Zude interface; it’s easy to get a little confused and overwhelmed (which explains the need for the guide).
There are currently eight tutorials available for Zude that can be accessed through the Zude gude: introduction, user’s manual, tags, channels, profiles, files, objects, and pages. The Zude introduction was not the same video labeled “Introduction to Zude” that you could access directly from the Zude guide. This 50-second video featured someone enthusiastically explaining all the things you could do with Zude: “Zude lets people like me do awesome things on the Web without being a geek.” It emphasizes how you can share video from YouTube, your favorite music, various images, entire web sites, widgets, and more. “With Zude, I control the world!” In other words, it was a slightly-more-informative-than-usual commercial.
For some reason I couldn’t get the Zude user’s manual to work, but the other videos functioned just fine. They combined narration with a visual presentation of what to click and how to use various features. The longest video was the one that explained Zude profiles; that was about two and a half minutes. The rest of them were at most a minute and a half, and some were under a minute. This emphasizes how easy it is to use the site.
Cool Zuders simply takes the user to pictures of several Zude users; you can click on those images to go to their web pages. I remembered seeing something about the ability to rate users in the navigation guide, so I’m guessing that might have something to do with determining which Zude users are “cool” enough to display when this is clicked. I think this is worth noting, by the way, for possible inspiration – as has often been observed, it’s very easy to put together an ugly-looking page when you have unlimited self-expression. Here’s an image from the page of one of the cool Zuders that showed up when I clicked this link:
Cool Zudescapes seemed to focus more on the subject matter of the pages being cool rather than the user being cool. There are tribute pages to beer, dead musicians (in general as well as specific ones), Corvettes, the inevitable cats, and more. The topics covered are as varied as the users covering them; there’s even an Unofficial First Edition Guide to Zude Terminology and something called Mashup Camp and Mashup University 2007. All of these pages are rated; since they are considered cool Zudescapes, as you would expect, most of them have at least four out of a possible five stars (displayed underneath the thumbnail for each page).
Here’s another quick note about using the site. When you click to a Zuder or a Zudescape from the Zude guide and try to use your back button, you might have a problem. This happens because the Zude guide is a pop-up; it can be moved and affected by your mouse, but it isn’t actually controlled from the controls on your browser.
When I clicked the back button after going to a particular cool Zuder or Zudescape from the ones displayed by the guide, my browser simply redisplayed the same Zuder or Zudescape. This was very annoying, but it was easy enough to go directly back to the Zude guide; there’s an icon in the upper right hand corner for this purpose. Still, it’s a little annoying when things don’t work the way you expect them to.
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