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My thoughts on Thoughts.Com
By LifeIsRisky | July 30, 2007
Overview
According to Thoughts.Com’s About page
We are a 100% free online blog community, with added features that you won’t find on other blog sites. We started www.thoughts.com as a place for people to share their thoughts. It has developed into an online community of bloggers world wide.
While still in beta they appear to be evolving and their user base is rapidly expanding. Like most other social type sites they offer their users the standard fare where can create a free blog, picture and video uploading and a few extras you won’t find at some of the other sites. For instance they have a built in mechanism for sharing podcasts, a feedback system for rating users’ blogs, pictures and podcasts. They even offer the ability to win a free vacation based on your overall user rating score.
What I liked
The first thing that caught my attention with this site was the color scheme. Unlike other sites which shall remain nameless, Thoughts.com doesn’t scream at you when the page loads. Perhaps that is a bit drastic but take a look and you will find that the light blue gradients and easy to read text make the front page actually pleasing. Speaking of text, the font is very readable Arial font throughout.
Next up on the list is their version of a tag cloud. When the page loads you instantly know if the users are chatting about something you care to read versus having to navigate a few pages in to find that info. Since I am a page scanner and usually decide within the first ten seconds whether or not I want to stay on a site, this is a major attention grabber and it makes me spend a few extra seconds looking around which is always a plus.
Signing up couldn’t be easier. It took me all of three minutes to get through the process, which was fairly painless even with one of those “Are you human” type tests. All they really requested was a username, password and some other generic data, nothing too taxing. What did surprise me though was they “signed me up” without a verification email requirement.
What I didn’t like
Of course no review could be complete if I didn’t at least mention some things that I wish were a bit different. First on the list is the fact that once you are signed up it doesn’t take you to a user control panel or even your blog. Instead you are asked to upload a picture, which I later found out was intended to be your avatar. While this isn’t a totally unreasonable it simply is not as intuitive as it could be.
The FAQ was rather short to be honest. I know most of the users probably learn by experimenting, but personally I like to take a look at the FAQ when I get stuck. Then again that could just be me.
Conclusion
Overall the site was well put together and easy to navigate if not totally intuitive. The creators obviously were aiming for the 14 – 18 year old crowd with the design and features, and by reading through several of the latest posts it appears they have hit their mark. If you are looking for a new take on the blogging and social scene then click on over, I am sure you won’t be disappointed.
I am interested to hear back from those who have signed up for Thoughts.Com or even those who just visited and looked around a bit. Take care and hope to hear from you soon.
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