Well I missed the second anniversary of The Great ezboard Disaster of 2005: the day when - depending on who or what you choose believe - a hacker managed to delete the current ezboard posts and at the same time access and delete the backups or someone running some script at ezboard on the boards cocked up royally. Despite claiming to have got the FBI involved and despite offering a $5,000 reward, no news as to any investigations or apprehension of the alleged hacker has ever been released. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
So anyway, like I said, I missed the second anniversary which probably goes to prove that I am not obsessed with ezboard, Inc., contrary to what their representatives and ezApologists would have you believe.
Now, what have they accomplished in those two years?
You may recall that their CEO, Robert Labatt, chose his updates on the data loss to announce they were working on a brand new version of ezboard which they later chose to christen Yuku, presumably as the ezboard brand may have become tarnished irreparably.
Yuku was then launched as "available today" at DEMOfall 2005 in September of that year. The USP that was the focus of their "Better Than Free" strapline was that ezboard, Inc. were promising to share advertising revenues with board owners and that an “average large board” could make $3-$5,000 per month from being on Yuku. They were seeking to differentiate Yuku from the other products in the marketplace: sharing advertising revenues with board owners, backing up the boards on a regular basis and actively promoting those boards.
Of course, back in September 2005, Yuku was at alpha release stage: not even beta. Development of the ezboard platform had stopped in early 2005 and their focus was firmly on Yuku.
Labatt started posting regularly in his "CEO Blogs" on ezboard - using WordPress, obviously... - and then on Yuku. When it became apparent that all the target dates for the transition from ezboard to Yuku were as likely to be met as it was that weapons of mass destruction were present in Iraq, rather than actually making promises that ezboard, Inc. could meet, Labatt blamed "nastygrams" - presumably like this blog - for being mean and come 1 November 2006 simply stopped posting completely!
The date for Yuku being "ready for prime time" of late 2006 came and went with a whimper and now here we are with Yuku trying hard to beat Google's offerings in terms of the longest ever beta.
So where are we now?
- There has been absolutely no mention of sharing advertising revenues with board owners.
- There has been absolutely no mention of when board owners can backup their own boards themselves if they don't trust ezboard, Inc. to do it properly (and who could blame them?).
- Yuku boards are currently free to operate and unlimited in size and display no adverts. Almost the exact opposite of ezboard, so why the faithful stay at ezboard and choose to pay for the privilege [sic] escapes me.
- It's just as well they do, though, because the only revenue from Yuku comes from the Google Adwords displayed in the user profiles.
- Big boards like the JJB Board that has been migrated over to Yuku are currently using up server space and no doubt bandwidth like there's no tomorrow (an inadvertent quip, but maybe apposite): their General Discussion forum alone runs to 1872 pages (and counting) of threads.
- ezboard have stated that users and boards have unlimited storage space for images.
Combine those last two, and all those cheap servers that Labatt photographed and added to his blog (before it got removed as a source of constant embarrassment to them) will soon be full and creaking under the stress. Don't believe me?
Well take a look at this:
"Some servers down. We're experiencing technical difficulties.
The technicals are being difficult. We're working on it! Everything will be up and running again shortly."
And this:
"Very Slow
The entire system is very slow to download for me today. It is not happening elsewhere- just Yuku."
Presumably this is so that former ezboard users will feel right at home...
Talking of which, one of the features they used to promote heavily was the 'global community' of ezboard. Personally, I never used to visit other ezboards unless by chance: I posted on our board and our board alone. I did, on the other hand, suffer from the global nature of usernames being used up: the one I wanted had been registered before I joined ezboard and despite it never being used for quite a few years, it was never available for re-registration. Now ezboard told people that all ezboard usernames would be reserved on Yuku so that JoeBloggs@ezboard wouldn't lose his username to some other JoeBloggs@Yuku. Which is all very well except that that simply means that in the absence of an abandoned username purge, the usernames available on Yuku are that much fewer.
ezboards used to have what they called "local accounts" so that you could join just one board and be JoeBloggs@ASingleBoard. Now that they've started the board imports, they've had to create another class of user and those usernames were getting unmanageable, breaking carefully laid out board styles, etc. So the Yuku team came up with a whole host of new indicators for different sorts of Yuku accounts. This has not gone down well and doesn't actually seem to be working properly either (no change there then)...
That aside, things must have improved generally with the better Yuku? Well no: their Customer Support [sic] is as bad as ever. We remember that despite being an Internet Services company, ezboard, Inc. seemed to only observe regular office hours, Monday to Friday. Well now it's worse than that: they don't seem to work Fridays either!
"Hey carrie we will try and jump on these quicker -- but you posted on friday :\"
So there we have it: Yuku still in beta, it's head honcho apparently now logging in - or being logged in by a colleague, present or former - but still remaining silent on what
he once claimed was his third love. No sign of any hints about pricing, admin.-managed backups, costs, etc.
I'm truly amazed that they haven't gone out of business or at the very least sacked the man ultimately responsible for their being where they are presently, Robert Labatt.
