2006_10_01_archive

Wallop new Microsoft social media platform

Ryan Stewart at ZDNet Tech Blogs was kind enough to send me an invite

to join/test drive Wallop Beta. It's the new social

media/Flash-based/rich internet application platform from Microsoft,

and, like Live Office Beta, I'm greatly underwhelmed.

"First Look at Wallop" by Ryan Stewart, Sept. 27, 2006.

After using the blog comment function to thank Ryan for the invite, I

posted a few remarks about my experience with Wallop.

[QUOTE]

I succeeded in login and posting a one sentence post to my Wallop

blog, but that's as far as I got tonight. Profile image upload

attempts failed: "One or more files was not received correctly by the

server. This was due to either an error or a user cancel."

No "retry" message, encouraging and enabling me to try to upload my

profile image again. Not sure how I retry, there are so many buttons

and some apparent redundancies, oddly enough, for the image uploads.

Tried uploading "home page photo" in the post editor. Failure again.

I feel like I'm floating in nothingness. No "About" page for Wallop.

Is there a Help page?

Where's the URL for my blog? How do I access my blog or send others to

see it? Where's "view your blog"? How do you title a post?

[END QUOTE]

In the left column are:

What's New | History | Favorites | Mods | Customize...

Why is there no About Wallop, FAQ, or Help pages? What is a Mod?

What's new with what? Everything fades to dark grey.

Upper right corner: Sign Out | Music Player

Bottom near to right corner: [headphones graphic] Music

What's the difference between Music Player and Music?

Welcome text after successful login:

"Welcome to Wallop! Wallop is a fun new place to be yourself and

connect with friends. A great way to start is to upload a picture.

Click on this to go to your picture page."

But "this" refers not to the dialogue pop up box, but to where the

arrow extending from the Welcome text box is pointing: the Pictures

box. Too bad it didn't work. Nothing else worked. Server overload or

other problems?

Blog posts are called "Conversations". You click on that word to see