Sorry FilmLoop, Take it from the top
by Aner Ravon

Guy Kawasaki is involved and in love. Michael Arrington is positive they’re a winner and dares us to quote him on that. Mike, Guy - here’s a dare!

FilmLoop is a free photocasting network, or in their words: “Tell your story in a live Loop and broadcast it to all your friends”. Praised by highly respected individuals and with the right mix of photo sharing, user centric, free, web 2.0, personalized…  figured I’d better join the party and try them out. I did… It left me with a sweet and sour taste in my mouth and I wondered why. This morning I finally figured it out.

FilmLoop is an interesting concept with more than a touch of glam. It has the right ingredients - shchique interface, a Mac client as well as one for windows, very good looking interface, cunning navigation scheme, a lot of business so-called-potential, catchy messages and well implemented viral marketing tools. Still, there is something basic missing - the actual use case.

As usual, I will start with the positive. Filmloop is one of the cooler apps. That, by itself, is not trivial. You download a rather small application and activate it very easily. The interface is intuitive and the initial navigating options are laid at the bottom of a self explanatory ticker. It seems like FilmLoop is based on simple to explain use cases. One: you create your own loops, invite your friends to watch, and manage the loops dynamically. Two: You subscribe to loops generated by your friends. Three: you start sharing subject matter loops with people who’s interests you share. The result reminds me more of a reality spaghetti than of the simple use cases, but we’ll get to that.

The interaction itself is constituted on a film-inspired-ticker that can be customized according to the your preferences. You can manage different loops (as a general note: it seems like FilmLoop’s creators have created a an interface for every possible scenario viral marketing scenario - IM, Email, etc.), invite friends to enjoy specific loops, generate a unique specific URL you can share with others, and more. Each frame is clickable and presents an “Apple like” interface for photo management. Once you subscribe to a loop you get alerts for new pictures if the ticker is minimized so you won’t be missing out.

Cool? Yes. Useful? Not really. Annoying after a while? Definitely.

While they went a long way on the look and feel, FilmLoop’s translation of the social need is way too superficial. It fails to grasp the real social drivers of sharing and it is too focused on quick new user gains then on serving the existing users. Sharing media has to fits naturally with usage habits or else it can never break the glass ceiling of nothing more than novelty. Let’s look at ourselves as users. I, for example, look to share photos with people I care about or about subjects I REALLY care about. That cannot be achieved using a flashy, always-on, ticker that is so unsolicited it can be often mistaken for another form of spam. The loops I found were not interesting and have not captured the potential “anarchistic” mindset that could have made them worth the additional-media-consumption time. What I did get were commercials, lod news and gossip that showed me nothing I haven’t seen before. Then, I started getting annoying frequent “alerts” of loop updates by users I cared nothing about with regards to subjects I cared nothing about…

As for the chosen user interaction model - most people I know cannot afford to have a live ticker on their desktop all day and frankly neither can I. The application is very rich, but also too complicated. At the end of the day, it seems like too much of a maintenance headache for its value. So here is some advice:

1. Make the UI simple and scratch some screens and sharing options.
2. Design a new, polite and protective invitation and sharing model. The current one simply doesn’t work. 
3. Go easy on the advertising.
4. Make it easy for users to differentiate between intimate groups, subject matter groups and general “garbage” loops.

All in all, FilmLoop is a good service but overhyped. I had to regretfully uninstall it, but will try it again when and if some necessary improvements are done.

Aner Ravon
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