10 Reasons Why SezWho Sucks OR Why It Shouldn’t

SezWho was launched in October 2007 to be a profile service that improves community engagement and enables content discovery.

The problem though, is SezWho could be much more. Realistically, they collect data from websites with the SezWho plugin installed. The amount of data they collect includes blog post titles, URLs, and ratings along with the comments associated with them. The potential the service could offer is great.

However, there lies the problem. SezWho’s service begins and ends with offering ratings and RSS feeds for users. The real use of the service is questionable other than seeing your own ratings for posts and comments.

Problems with SezWho

1. No directory of blogs that have SezWho installed.
2. No top commentators list.
3. Responses take forever on suggestions within their forum.
4. No real “goal” to be found on their website.
5. The plugin lacks features, any real changes to the features must be done internally.
6. Can’t merge accounts.
7. No “real” value to blog owners to have it installed.
8. No “real” features available.
9. No top voted posts.
10. Lack of communication.

Many of these problems could be solved by releasing an API and having a larger staff or an involved community. Getting the community involved is always a great way to help expand a service and its support group.

With a service like SezWho, the community should be involved from the start. What features the community wants is only part of it. The real involvement is getting them to use the service and become active within it. Give them something to come back for and use consistently. Allow the commentators to compete against each other and the ability to find more blogs to comment and rate by having a directory and top commentators list.

As we all know, SezWho only works if both the commentator and blog owner is involved. If a blog does not have the service installed the commentator does not benefit. Because of this, the blog owner must also benefit. By having a directory which includes all SezWho blogs, a top rated blogs list, an updated blog posts list, or some other way to involve blog owners would give blog owners and authors a greater reason to use SezWho than the current setup.

Please SezWho, get your act together; you could be much more with a little creativity. The data your system holds has amazing ability, use it. Your users will love you for it and so will your pocket book.

Written: Aug 15, 2008
Tags: comments, Reviews, sezwho

17 Responses to "10 Reasons Why SezWho Sucks OR Why It Shouldn’t"

• colleen
  September 16, 2008 @ 10:28 pm | Reply
  

  sezwho does not increase comments at all. Most people don’t even get it.

• Gary R. Hess
  September 17, 2008 @ 12:44 am | Reply
  

  colleen, you are right. Which is the problem. SezWho should increase comments or at the very least visitors. It doesn’t… thus the problem.

• Jitendra
  September 17, 2008 @ 2:23 am | Reply
  

  Collen, Gary,

  Good points re:additional traffic.

  We are working on launching a portal feature that will drive more traffic to the sites based on categorized conversation and leaders in each of the categories.

  Thanks, Jitendra