Comments on: Spotback: Personalized Portal

By: Webby's World

Webby's World — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 19:01:41 +0000

Spotback

Spotback is a new AJAX-powered, which provides the reader with personalised stories, grabbed from news sources and blogs, based on their ratings of other stories!
The site allows you to remove categories from your view. So if you don’t wish to re…

By: kourge

kourge — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 21:36:12 +0000

This seems to be like Digg, but more Ajaxy.

By: evan

evan — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 01:49:51 +0000

There seems to be a general lack of symmetry in the user interface. If you rate a story positively, you get a new story, but if you rate a story negatively, you don’t get any stories removed. I understand the reasons why the developer would want to do it that way, but from a usability perspective it just doesn’t seem right. Also if you rate a story positively, and then change the rating to a different but still positive rating, you get yet another story, and can endlessly proliferate stories down the page.

And I agree with above, the yellow box makes me think that I’m not allowed to click anywhere else in the page, even though that’s exactly what I’m supposed to do.

By: ajaxmeoff

ajaxmeoff — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 18:54:59 +0000

Yawn… It’s even labelled “beta version”. It turned me off immediately when a yellow div appeared over the content, and could only be made to go away by clicking on a link – i just wanted to close the damn thing.

The sliders are stupid and are just another instance of ajax-candy over utility. I agree, the stars work – if it ain’t broke…

Do we need another portal? This site is just another instance of ajaxturbation. That’s not to say the site has no plus points – displaying content inline, etc is nice, and the overall layout is clean and easy; perhaps I’m being to harsh?