Yuku's Current Status?
A couple of interesting posts and web pages when considered together which follow on from my earlier post "33,000 People Can't Be Wrong" where I considered the way ezboard, Inc. appeared to have ditched the customer surveys they claimed to have done, along with their appearing to have dumped fanfared features such as the promised advertising revenue sharing.
Firstly, there's this post from a very interesting thread about ezboard apparently being linked to an authentication hacking incident. It links through to a Wikipedia article about software development stages.
Secondly, there's the Yuku Feature Voter which requires you to have a Yuku log-in and indeed be able to log-in with it.
Now, if you look at the Wikipedia article where it discusses the pre-alpha stage you'll see it suggests that:
"At this stage designers are still determining exactly what functionalities the product should have."
So it would seem that not only is Yuku not "available today" (as claimed by ezboard, Inc. at DEMOfall 2005), it's not at beta stage (as claimed by ezboard, Inc. subsequently), nor alpha stage (as mentioned by some ezboard employees) but pre-alpha!
Let's take a closer look at that Feature Voter. The one that's currently "In Development" is "new message board, forum and topic pages [which] will be faster...". So users of the Yuku system which is so painfully slow have voted for faster message boards. Quelle surprise...
Now bearing in mind ezboard once claimed that:
"Yuku has more than 14 million registered users and 500,000 communities. Yuku is growing by more than 200,000 registered users and 6,000 communities a month."
you'd expect them to have had many thousands of votes on this feature voter, wouldn't you?
No. In fourth place as I type, with a massive 34 votes is ... a feature to allow you "to import your message board from ezboard to Yuku".
Er, I thought Labatt had promised that back in March 2006 and yet now it's only on the 'maybe' list?
Incredible.
