BubbleShare (Beta) Review

I’ve done my best to conduct a quite extensive (and, indeed, intensive) test of the BubbleShare (Beta) service and have a number of points to make, both positive and negative.

Firstly the basic idea of the service that sets it apart from competing products is that it will allow users to tell a “story� by means of their uploaded images. This is much enhanced by the service not only allowing but actively encouraging the use of audio clips to accompany each image…this is an excellent idea and is vastly superior to the more commonly found text caption(s). The implementation of this part of the service is beyond reproach.

The speed of BubbleShare’s servers is, currently, impressive though this may or may not be maintained as the service grows.

The site is flash heavy including both the standard and enhanced image uploaders…these being web based rather than downloadable products. In use the enhanced uploader has frequently baulked at some of my images when then have been offered as part of a larger upload but accepted these same images when they are added individually. Unfortunately this has revealed other problems:

When a single image that is part of a mass upload of images fails to upload properly, for whatever reason, user input by way of clicking a confirmation box is required before the upload can commence…thus making unattended uploading of large(ish) collections of images problematic at best. The error messages give no indication as to why an image may have failed to upload properly and given that said images often upload properly when tried again there’s no way to tell if the problem was with the image, the service or any other part of the process.

The service sends two e-mails following the addition of a new album, one being for a link to an administration page and the other being for a link to share with others. Unfortunately this means that each album has to be treated as a separate entity to any other albums added to the service by the same user. This adds some limitations to what the user can do, in particular an inability to move images from one of ones albums to another. I’d prefer to have a per user login and password system that would allow access to a unified admin page allowing control of all of ones albums from a single web page and the ability to move images between albums.

The site itself is presented in a clean, clear and simple manner that makes the images the focal point of the user experience rather than having the site overwhelm them, the systems for slideshow, captioning and commenting work well and the slideshow editor is very easy to use allowing one to quickly re-order ones images…again this fits nicely with the site’s aim to “tell a story� with the images.

Feedback I’ve had from friends to whom I’ve recommended this service suggests that it could do with a system that gives advice on its indended use and its systems…a small presentation offering static images of each part of the process a typical user might address would be ideal…I would suspect that this is already in the pipeline for when the service comes out of its beta phase. Internet savvy users will soon work it all out for themselves anyhow.

The service is in beta form so such minor glitches as I’ve noted above are to be expected; I hope that this user feedback may be of use to the site and help them to move their site foreward.

BubbleShare

Technorati Tags: Images, Sharing , Photographs