Seesmic Look! Would it work for my Ex?

So Loic Le Meur and Seesmic decided to release Look.

And being Shana-licious, I stuck it on a netbook to test.

As many people have commented, it is an extremely beautiful UI.  This doesn’t mean I am not going to nitpick at it.  The question is, Would I recommend this to my Ex, who recently registered for an account, is following 7 people, and as far as I know, never goes on Twitter.

No he’s on a Mac. (besides the point.)

Let’s pretend he wasn’t on a Mac.  He’s still pretty prototypical.  He’s following a few people he knows, and some other corporately stuff.  He’s never tweeted out.  He’s pretty typical as far as twitter users go, Despite what the rest of us keep telling ourselves  I’m not sure if he knows what he would say (I should ask, among many other questions).  Would this interest him?

From what I can tell that answer is probably (if it were on a Mac….)

It’s an extremely clean and simple UI.  It just sort of scrolls in front of you.  The lettering and pictures are very clean.  The one thing I dislike about the whole UI actually is that the last choice of letter colors seems to blend into the bottom of the screen, making it hard to read or even know if there are further choices.

Another nitpick element for me is that I was running on the XP Remix for a netbook.  It’s really clear this is for Windows 7 with a touchscreen, you are supposed to scroll with your hands.  That may be great in theory, in practice, it is a little difficult to fully understand how to switch off on a netbook without a mouse.  The response was slow, and sometimes mouse commands were ehhhh.  That might be Josiah’s the netbook’s fault though. Based on the look, I would actually stick this on a slow box, (or even the Boxee box as the screen saver), and have it try to compensate speed as well as try to compensate for the multiple input problem.

Speaking of that look- one of the most intriguing features were how the backgrounds changed.  It took me a while to realize this, but what was happening was look imports the backgrounds from twitter and puts a glassy, shadowy overlay on them.  And it looks amazing.  I have to congratulate you on making a way for a webpage served up in an unusual way.  The coloring is beautiful, and in most cases it makes the navigation easier to read.  However, it can create problems if the the colors of the background are the same shades as the text.  And there is no way to predict in advance.  Buyer beware.  You may end up looking at a twitter page and not being able to figure out how to get back.  That needs to be changed somehow in newer releases.

A further conceptual question for me is, does my ex care about Woot.  Or Gary Vaynerchuck. or a whole slew of things offered on Look.  (I’m not telling, I actually could call him and find out, we’re on pretty good terms).  It becomes a huge question, since it looked to me that there was overlap between these lifestyle areas versus the branded areas.  Why isn’t the CME Group’s curated page part of the “brands and skins” page, and instead part of the “money” page?  These really should be more closely integrated, especially from a marketing perspective.

From a marketing perspective as well, these pages actually have to be even more closely curated than they are now (although the cute little techie in me says,non-exitent pigtails and all, good job on the beta!)  Having grown up in a highly gendered environment and seeing these arguments play out on the Internet about how we gender female techies and male techies, versus say as Chris Dixon goes “the normals” I see the world as a far more complex situation than I think I should allow myself.  It might be worth it to put people through a short survey to get them set up on the “suggested” lists to look at as well as to see what kind of marketing they are suggestible to.  It doesn’t bother me to say that I am never going to look at a RedBull page, and I see that as sort of Frat Guy-ish (maybe because the Frat Guys I know, who are awfully nice, kept hosting sponsored parties…)  I probably would be more welcome to a page about, Christian Louboutin and the CME Group and Tech.  And it is worth figuring out and offering up different segments, if you plan on going on this path.  As for my ex, that’s his business.

Keeping these two groups sort of seperate (fashion versus branding) makes the  idea of how to track and follow this information for both groups of people (user versus producer) complicated.  Mix it up people.

In a totally unrelated note: Because of the way the UI is set up, you really could use it as a sort of monitor device for CRM.  You would need to alter it slightly to be allowed to dig deeper, but the essential idea of having a wide spectrum of one channel on what looks like a big screen flow in front of you seems like a much more useful way of looking at the world than the multipronged approach.  Much less distracting.  It looks like a stock-ticker or something, where often you don’t need to see everything until you need to do research.   The stock ticker of CRM.  Now that sounds nice.

Have a good Sunday!

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