A WebJam From The UK

Nov 25

A WebJam From The UK

Mashable! has a review of Webjam, an alleged “Swiss Army knife” of Web 2.0 niftyness that might whet your appetite for making a web page, blog, and/or profile if you’re deficient of any significant code-editing skills. European in origin, Webjam consists of several tools, several moldable pages, and several others, all worth exploring, if only for the sake of getting down with some beta testing tomfoolery, albeit in a far cleaner fashion than your Play Doh days of yore.

Pete Cashmore at Mashable! was offered an invite to the invite-only preview (Now they appear to have widened the scope of the trial to a ‘public beta.’), and he had some good things to say about it, as well as some baddies. The first red flag is Webjam’s promotion material, which seems, according to Cashmore, to eschew straightforward text to make way for the same old “We are Web 2.0”-type shtick.

The screenshots available on Mashable! make Webjam out to be a promising visual treat, but time will tell whether it stacks up against the tried-and-true Netvibes, the veteran MySpace, or the recent hit, Vox.

Profy’s Take:

As far as web-based content creation goes, there are few items out there today that have as many options off the bat as Webjam. Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Goowy, MySpace, Vox: these all are stronger in their respective areas than Webjam is as a whole. But that’s the thing. Webjam is all those feature-specific services rolled into one, and it only make sense to produce something that’s a little “picky”. To have it all would be to have a labyrinthine stew.

The beta’s UI allows for intuitive operation. The segregation of your ’sites’ can take some getting used to, but the separation could end up one of Webjam’s strong points. It all depends on who Webjam ultimately caters to.

Webjam is in its early stages – as of this moment, it is going into its 4th day of the public beta – and it’s fair to say it already trumps a number of mashups. Improvements and amendments will be made according to feedback from the community. So join up, muck about, and tell them what you want to see in the next revision.

Screenshots:

Webjam Home/Start Page (After Logging In):

Webjam ‘Sites’: