*Jozzua Notes from a Business and Marketing Strategist/Tactician

SMART’s Attempt At Social Networking

Smart's attempt at social networking - fail.

At the start of the year, a number of bloggers were introduced to Smart's MySandbox - an attempt at social networking by the large telecommunications company. There were other social networks already around but Smart was banking on mobility. It's idea was to extend Friendster, Plurk, or Twitter to the cell phone. With a hefty pocket, they invested in marketing and development.

In concept, it was sound. The implementation, however, was terrible.

Why? From the onset the application was plagued with usability problems. Comments from the people who tried it:

It's hard to navigate through the app. Some buttons are redundant or sayang lang. -Sasha

Regnard, a usability consultant says, with emphasis:

Unclear navigation - how do users navigate through the different parts of the site? ... if you ask my professional opinion, YOU CAN'T LAUNCH SANBOX TO THE PUBLIC IN ITS CURRENT FORM. - Regnard

From Ms. Noemi Dado, famous local blogger:

for me it lacks mobile functionality. Upload of photos are not visible. Mobile blogging is not fast enough as we have to log in to post. I have to spend 10 pesos to post an entry while at an event and you know how it is in events. One is busy and just have a few minutes to dabble with the phone and send updates. I need the mo-blogging to be swift. - Noemi

Checking it now, I just had 23 friend requests. To approve all those friends, I had to click approve 23 times. What a time-waster!

What smart should have done? Instead of having a gazillion features - they focused on a simple app with 1 to 3 features - like twitter, and gave people an awesome experience on the cell phone. The cellphone should have been the platform.

Just consider - on my cell phone it's easier for me to upload a picture and mobile blog through blogspot. I just take a snapshot and instantly upload. To do that with MySandbox, I have to send an MMS to the site, create a blog entry, and attach the picture.

Big difference.

It also didn't help that much when the system went down for almost a month. People who were already using the site found themselves suddenly with a blank screen. Momentum was lost right there.

To all the folks at smart:

KEEP IT SIMPLE but USEFUL. If you had just made a simple cellphone application works like twitter (showing status updates), that allowed for 'one-button-click' picture and video sharing, that would've been more useful that this chop-seuy social networking app. You tried to do too much. It was a waste of time and money.

Now, in the meantime, while you guys are trying to FIX it, people are going over to facebook, twitter, multiply and plurk. They'll just use an iPhone/cellphone with the twitter/facebook app.

You're losing.

I know this cause I work with design and usability every day. I manage the launch of very simple e-commerce sites that generate immediate revenue. In my opinion, something like this would've taken our team probably a month or two to develop.

It would be already making money for the company.