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
- No directory of blogs that have SezWho installed.
- No top commentators list.
- Responses take forever on suggestions within their forum.
- No real “goal” to be found on their website.
- The plugin lacks features, any real changes to the features must be done internally.
- Can’t merge accounts.
- No “real” value to blog owners to have it installed.
- No “real” features available.
- No top voted posts.
- 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
Van
August 16, 2008 @ 1:21 am
The first thing make me unhappy: sometime i can’t connect to blog who have installed SezWho.
The second thing: SezWho doesn’t support for joomla right now.
Ederic Eder
August 16, 2008 @ 4:07 am
I actually like what SezWho does, i.e. track a person’s comments on every SezWho-enabled site. However, it messed up my layout — doubled the author’s avatar on my site. And I also have a thing against pop-ups. :p
Margaret
August 16, 2008 @ 10:09 am
You have outlined very nicely some of the main shortcomings of SezWho. I found that very few of my readers bothered to use the ratings system on either posts or comments and that, contrary to billing, it did not increase my comment rate at all.
I also had a real problem with the fact that the code would not pass w3c validation tests. I realize that I have other validation issues with this particular blog, but had Sez Who on 3 blogs one of which validates perfectly with the plug-in deactivated but has over 70 errors when active. The SezWho owners don’t appear to be too concerned with correcting that issue, so after two months on the one blog and a month on the other two, I’ve deactivated it on all 3.
I’m still looking for a Wordpress plug-in that sorts comments like a bulletin board does — threaded. All the threaded comment plug-ins I’ve tried have not organized the comments in the fashion I expect them to. If anybody knows of one, I sure wish they would tell me about it.
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Gary R. Hess
August 16, 2008 @ 12:09 pm
Good luck finding that plugin… I’ve only seen two “threaded” comment plugins, the one I am using and another one that looks pretty close to it.
Jared Taylor
August 16, 2008 @ 7:31 pm
you forgot the main reason not to use sezwho.. it makes your page load very slowly! very memory hungry.. and for that reason i removed it.
Gary R. Hess
August 16, 2008 @ 10:14 pm
It makes your pages run slow only because their servers were down quite a bit a few weeks ago and once they got back up there was quite the back load on it. You can solve the ’slow’ problem by hosting the files internally. As for the memory hungry part that had to do with the loading. They said they were adding more servers to help with the problem, anyhow.
StanHayes
August 17, 2008 @ 4:16 pm
Hate to be the guy that just says, “Yeah, your post is right on,” but it really is. Points 2 and 9 really could make a much more valuable service.
tedd corman
August 17, 2008 @ 4:32 pm
Gary,
I’m sorry SezWho has not lived up to your expectations, but thanks for your post - user feedback is very important to us at SezWho.
In case you were not aware, we do currently offer the “red carpet” widget which shows the five most highly rated contributors on your site - you can see an example on our blog - http://blog.sezwho.com/blog/ and we also have an API available at http://sezwho.com/download.php/ We’ve also recently added several u/i configuration options to the plugin including the ability to customize text, colors, turn off popup, etc.
We are currently working on several more features which should be available soon. We will do our best to address all the issues you’ve mentioned above. Iif you have any other specific features/capabilities you’d like to see in SezWho please let us know and we will do our best to provide.
regards, tedd at sezwho
Gary R. Hess
August 17, 2008 @ 5:54 pm
Tedd, I knew those features existed, but they aren’t what I was talking about. When I say ‘top commentators’ I don’t mean for MY website, I mean for the entire SezWho userbase. The same goes for the top posts. You guys have the data needed to do this. Just take the ratings over a certain amount of days, then display them in a list. It will let your visitors see what pages are doing well and visit them, then rate them and comment on them. It would bring your user activity up 100-fold and make bloggers and commentators happy.
As for the API, it is rather lacking. The help associated with it is nonsense and the API provided is mainly for porting it to another blogging software. I meant to make your system almost open source but not quite. Allow us to use your servers and databases to store our information, but let us take what we want back from it to display large lists of our commentators, top posts, etc. ourselves at our leisure.
tedd corman
August 18, 2008 @ 6:58 pm
Gary,
Thanks for elaborating.
Both improvements to the API to extend it well beyond a tool for porting SezWho to additional platforms as well as providing information about top comments, posts, blogs, etc. across the SezWho network are on our roadmap and will be rolled out as soon as we can. Keep an eye out!
thanks - tedd
Jitenda
August 20, 2008 @ 2:19 am
Gary,
Interesting post and thanks for the feedback.
We were originally working on the a plan of keeping the conversations at the sites where they are happening…as such we really did not stress the portal element of the service.
Now as you are pointing out we can actually add to the conversation and traffic without competing with the host site…We will be adding these features shortly.
Thanks, Jitendra
Gary R. Hess
August 20, 2008 @ 2:45 pm
Thanks for the response. It is appreciated.
Devil's Advocate
August 22, 2008 @ 10:03 pm
I use Intense Debate…it works really well.
turnip
August 30, 2008 @ 6:37 am
I mostly agree with your assessment of the plugin, and also your ideas on what would improve it. However on the issue of forum response, before entrecard flooded the system, I got personal next day service. Often the response was by email and included the code I needed to change. As for a directory of blogs, Entrecard provides a list of sezwho blogs, and they are a partner of Sezwho. I have customized the code a bit, and also customized the icons. Sure, I’d love to be able to do more.
The one thing all bloggers want is more traffic. If would be fantastic if Sezwho could provide a “related posts” feature. So if someone reads one blog article, they might see a list of other related blog articles on the same blog, and also on other blogs, all within the sezwho network.
colleen
September 16, 2008 @ 10:28 pm
sezwho does not increase comments at all. Most people don’t even get it.
Gary R. Hess
September 17, 2008 @ 12:44 am
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
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