Glogster is a new service that lets users create web pages (they call them posters) using Flash elements. Upload photos, songs, text and other stuff, drag it around, and call it a day. You can embed the poster on another website, but its too big for most blogs or social networking sites at 960 pixels wide. You can also add friends, so technically its a social network.
It reminds me a lot of Geocities back in the day (remember?), perhaps because of the colorful backgrounds and chaotic mess that results when you create a page. Lots of people created Geocities pages, added a picture, a little text, a guest book and a website counter, and that was their home page. No one visited more than once, though, since the page lacked fresh content.
And that was waaaaay before the days of social networking and the explosion of blogs. Today people have a lot more to do on the web except read news, buy stuff at Amazon and send a few emails. Glogster either needs to find a way to widgetize this in a way that gets MySpacers and Facebookers excited (see Slide, RockYou, etc.), or they will likely stay a ghost town. Strike that, even with a reasonable widget strategy, I doubt Glogster has a very bright future. Frankly, it isn’t as good as Scrapblog, which targets the same niche and launched nearly a year ago.
People remain enamored with Flash as an environment to create websites, though. Wix, an Israeli startup in private beta that is doing something in this area, is getting good reviews from people who’ve seen it (we still haven’t). We’ll see if they have a business model that breaks out of the Geocities ghetto.
Glogster is giving away some iPods and gift certificates to new users who create posters and satisfy a set of too-complicated-for-me-to-read rules. So if you’ve got some time and lack an iPod, there you go. See Download Squad and Go2Web2 for their take on Glogster.
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