Pretty in Pink - Glogster invites you to Poster Yourself
Cute, pink, flowery, refreshing and girly, Glogster is a new site that lets users create web pages, which they call “posters”, using Flash elements. Glogster exhort you to “Poster yourself” – now how can you resist that? You can upload photos, songs, text and various other items. Supposedly, you can even embed your poster on another website, but at 960 pixels wide, your poster will be way too big for most blogs or the likes of Facebook et al.
You can build a friend network to which you add other “Glogsters”, making it very much like some of the current social networking sites. You can rate other people’s Glogs too.
When you sign up for an account with Glogster you quickly arrive at a large Flash rectangle where you can drag and drop images, videos, and sounds. You can either use either preloaded images and snazzy decorations from the site itself, or upload your own. Then as an added embellishment you can play about with drop-shadows, fonts, and the like. You can add links too of course.
Some pundits are already saying that the site is a little like Geocities was, before the explosion of social networking sites and blogs. For people who are already using Facebook and MySpace, it is difficult to see what Glogster really has to offer, and the site faces competitors such as Scrapblog that launched about a year ago - although, admittedly, Scrapblog does not have such a pretty homepage.
There was a time when the idea of creating your own website for free was revolutionary, but now it is just old hat. Most ISP’s offer free websites nowadays. A serious part of the critique is that Glogster are not really offering anything new.
At the moment Glogster is attempting to pull in the punters by giving away some iPods and gift certificates to new users who create posters.
Glogster is one way of using Flash without giving yourself a heart attack, and the very pink and chic homepage may well pull in the teenage girls who love scrapbooking. It will be interesting to see if this poster site takes off. If its design is anything to go by, it could do.