I had visited eyespot.com before when an email was circulated by Dan O'Sullivan higlighting their new video mixing capability. Unfortuntely, mostly due to not exploring the site extensively, I missed much of the point. Thanks to a recent email about their mobile posting capability from Shawn Van Every I decided to take another look. I signed up and it was quite easy to input my phone info and thus receive my own unique email address to send video to the site (not to self- perhaps FreeFormed should do this, although how do we then deal with issues of annonimity??). Unfortuntely, (maybe?) the content that has been posted so far, highlighted specifically in their top ten 'most popular' posts, seems to be relatively trivial. Among the posts, their was video of a dog and a woman in sexy lingerie (need I say more). Still what they are doing has the potential to be interesting, especially given the video mixer, which is something I haven't really seen, at least not on a site that supports mobile posting. But perhaps the lack of relevant media content highlights the reasons why Shawn specified to us early on that we needed to gear FreeFormed towards a specific set of users. I also think that eyespot is underplaying the mobile posting capability, if I hadn't known to look for it I probably wouldn't have found it. This is probably intentional but, while it is important to support the upload-form-your-computer capability, if their purpose in any way includes seriously supporting mobile video, perhaps they should be more vocal about it. I also searched through their groups and forums, groups being user created 'forums' and forums being something else entirely. The most popular groups also for the most part seemed to be slightly uninteresting (perhaps reinforcing Megan's concept of including digs or some form of relevance rating...maybe?),

As far as user interface goes, it seems very simple but also very non-functional. I spent a half hour trying to figure out where I could tag or comment on something. I would've thought that this functionality didn't exist had I not seen 'tags' on the front page of my profile page. Perhaps you can't do this.....in which case they need to fix that immediately. The only interesting feature, which I had been pushing for with FreeFormed, was the inclusion of giving users their own blog. However, in seeing how they organized the blog I see what Megan's issues with this idea were, The blog posts are completely seperate from the media, which I suppose is fine if you're not blogging about the media....but then go get a blog on blogger....right? And if the blog posts are related to media content they should be displayed with the media rather then as a seperate entity. Perhaps this is why we opted for extended comment fields instead.

All in all, I was not as impressed as I thought I would be. Again, interesting concept, but the functionality falls short of what I would've expected. They could've taken a few hints from flickr.