MCM is much cooler than you

Of course whenever someone does something unbelievably cool my first instinct is to critique the various aspects of it from different angles

MCM always brings the most impressive online publishing schemes to the table. If you have not checked out the new 1889 Labs I suggest you do right now just for the wow factor.

Of course whenever someone does something unbelievably cool my first instinct is to critique the various aspects of it from different angles

The new 1889 Labs is a study in internet niching. It’s the kind of site design that would make a venture cap investor’s eye bleeds because there’s no possible way you could scale it for millions of unique visitors … but the beauty it it, I think, is that it’s not intended to be that.

The Good:

• IT’S PRETTY!!! XD
• I love the bestsellers list and new releases lists on the book section. It’s immediately appealing to me as a reader
• the eReader MCM has built in continues to be unbelievably pretty, awesome and easy to use XD I feel like I’m in a Sci-fi movie

The Bad:

• The layout is not particularly intuitive … at least not on the main page. You have all these arrows and tabs and the only way for the user to figure out what they do is by playing with them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it will affect bounce rates because the majority of internet users do not want to figure things out.
• The site is slow on my computer. Which is only a year old and I had custom built to max out the RAM on it @_@. If there’s a ten second delay on my computer when I try to scroll down on an iframe … will older computers crash or spontaneously combust? O_O
• It’s ridiculously unscalable O.o This is a classic embarrassment of riches scenario. The more devoted readers MCM has the more exponentially expensive this site is to run. You can see that he’s devoted some thought to this by pushing the video off to YouTube. Put it this way: there’s a reason Google looks like it does, a reason Craigslist looks like it does and why Amazon looks like it does too. There’s also a very good reason why Google beat the shit out of all of it’s rivals that has nothing to do with silly search generating algorithms. Once you get past a certain point in traffic, even the smallest images become really really expensive to host. With a totally tricked out site? Well I’m not entirely convinced the all these graphics wouldn’t choke even the most generous transfer allowances should MCM writing hit a more mainstream audience
• It doesn’t really organize information so well. Which makes sense, at the end of the day it is still WordPress after all, but the 2010 Promo video speaks of 1889 Labs taking on new writers. As a crusader for digital publishing houses this makes me unbelievably happy … but … uhhh … where? The super neat filmstrip navigation is already pretty full with MCM’s projects. I don’t imagine he’s going to stop his crazy crazy writing pace any time soon … so how many publications can that kind of navigation  handle before it gets really annoying to watch the film strip animation (JScript I assume) slowly hobble around?
• No universial login … I need to login to use the Twitter stream … login again to use Pig in the Box … and login yet again to leave a comment? @_@ That’s an awful lot of logging in

The Unbelievably Cool

• The Twitter integration and stream is so cool it makes me weep with joy XD I honestly didn’t think MCM could do something cooler when he worked up the Twitter integration for 3D1D … this is cooler
• I love that the eReader exports to ePub
• Although I don’t fully understand it. I love the Mystery Box thing. MCM is a master of the incentive :3 There are so many ultra neat things you end up promoting everything he does to everyone you know just to find all the little easter eggs XD

Bookmark It

Hide Sites