sarahintampa

I recently wrote a post on Read Write Web about how "Blogs Comments Still Matter," which, among other things, highlighted the issue of blogs getting more negative comments than positive ones. In the post, I mentioned the FriendFeed/WordPress plugin, created thanks to the fabulous Glenn. One of the commenters, as it turned out, was Nick Halstead, creator of Fav.or.it (and Tweetmeme). Despite the fact that the post was about negativity, his comment (below) came across as just a little negative, beginning…

Cannot believe that a hacked together wordpress plug-in gets coverage on RRW…

Hmm…was that a tone, I detected? Now, I had been interested in Fav.or.it up until this point, in fact, even had it flagged as something to research for a post, but couldn’t decide if it was more RWW or Channel 10 material. But then, his comment turned me off a bit. Corvida picked up on this and mentioned that this was bad PR for Fav.or.it.

Today, Louis Gray gives the Fav.or.it service some feedback on his site, in a post entitled "Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite."

Nick responds in the comments, saying:

Franky I have no idea why I gave you the time of day Louis, you have no understanding of what we are trying to do to move the blogosphere into a much wider market….

And then Nick went to post on the Fav.or.it blog, but he still couldn’t just address the issues, he also had to insult Louis personally:

So Louis I am happy you do not want to try out service again - you missed the point completely and I doubt you will ever be able to have the imagination to see the future that we see.

I was really hopeful for fav.or.it - I mean, it looked cool, but this type of negativity just isn’t right.

Maybe Nick is just new to having to be both the creator/developer and the marketing guy, and he probably views the service as his baby. When that’s the case, it’s common to take the critiques of a service personally. However, instead of drawing attention to the service and debating its strengths and weaknesses, he’s drawing the attention to himself.

This is not good and it certainly detracts from the product and its potential, which is, by the way, a way to bring the blogosphere and feed-reading to the masses. I mean, hey, Scoble liked it, right?

I’m still curious about Fav.or.it, having yet to have a chance (an invite) to try it out for myself, and if it truly is designed for the masses, and not us web geeks, well, that’s fine. I worked in IT for some time and I’m pretty familiar with the varying levels of tech-savvy that some people have. (It’s actually quite shocking, if you want to know the truth).

But to get insulted for having an opinion on the service? That’s not for me. So if anyone asks me to review fav.or.it, I think I’m going to pass. 

Follow the conversation at YackTrack!