Zude Offers New Technology in Social Networking - More Help
(Page 4 of 4 )
The link to Zude in the News took me to a list of stories that covered Zude; this was exactly what I expected. I’d already read many of them, having done my homework before visiting this site.
Zude Help Resources offered me five links: online documentation (with a search box), community forums, “Why Zude?” (a presentation discussing the platform), the Zude support center, and an FAQ. All of these seemed well organized. Of particular interest was Tip-Z in the Zude support center, “the resident (virutal) Zudette known for her friendly help and assistance.” Maybe it's just me being dense, or maybe it's the fact that the site is in beta, but I couldn’t figure out how to start a chat with her.
Surprisingly, I received a message from Steve Poppe, a spokesperson for Zude, not long after I started building my page. When I told him I was having trouble understanding some of Zude’s capabilities, he had another Zude employee contact me. The messaging interface, at least, is easy to understand:
And I have to say, the help I've received from real people, both in e-mail and through messages on the site, has been first rate. These people are very enthusiastic about what they're doing, and what they're bringing to the web. They're also very knowledgeable, and clearly enjoy sharing that information. They know that the only way to gain and keep users is to make sure they have a fun experience with the site, and they do their best to achieve that goal.
It’s nice that Zude offers all of these different ways to understand the site, but I suppose it’s a little ironic that the most useful help I found (aside from the personal help), in terms of organization and understanding it, was on the toolbar that’s at the top of every page, under “Help.”
The biggest issue with the site, from my point of view, is that users MUST have pop-ups enabled in order to get the most out of it. Another issue with the site is that it can be a little overwhelming, at least at first. A friend of mine who checked Zude over before letting me use it on his computer (I had some concerns as far as possible download issues) commented that it looked like a rip-off of MySpace. As more than one reviewer noted, it’s very easy to make an ugly-looking page; MySpace taught us that, and cruising Zude provides additional proof of this.
Zude claims to be a lot more than just another social networking site. We’ll check out that claim in the next article. In the second part of this review, I’m actually going to build a Zude page and talk about some of the uses for this technology.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
/ 5 
