Switching to O2 has gone smoothly. Best part was not having to speak to a call centre; it was all done over the web and I'm being billed correctly. Oh, and I can see correct information about my account via the website, unlike Orange where bills from months previously would sometimes pop up for no explicable reason. Things like that do not instill confidence.

I took a look at O2's Bluebook service yesterday. It's not a bad idea; you can store your contacts online in case you lose your phone, it saves all the text messages you send or receive to your account and you can upload media from your phone and keep a blog. The problem with it is that it's poorly executed. I can see that O2 probably have the idea that getting people to be social on their site is good for their brand but I don't think it's going to be successful.

Take the blogging as one example; if I'm going to be bothered to blog then there are better platforms out there that don't moderate what I want to post. This is a stupid move, it's far simpler to have a 'report offensive content' function on the site and let the users do their own policing. I wonder what would happen if you posted something negative about O2 and something positive? By all means allow people to host a blog but why not provide a widget that allows me to post to a blog I already keep, or a sidebar widget that allows for microblogging via text for free. It all needs to be shareable and not restricted to the O2 site. When are the phone companies going to figure out that the web bloomed because it wasn't a walled garden? All their past efforts have been doomed to failure because someone who makes decisions doesn't grasp this. There are sites out there that already do a lot of this stuff much better than they ever will; let them do the heavy lifting and let your users have a much richer experience.

1 original comment:

Like the new look man! I’m all tagged up
Comment by Jawils — 6 April, 2008 @ 5:55 am