Last week on the 4th of july Podshow Plus went open beta. I was already part of the beta, got a golden ticket to access it through their devcast. And I only logged in twice. It’s layout and how things work is very cumbersome. They implemented some Ajax stuff on the site, but it was riddled with bugs at the time. I logged in again once it went live to the public and the bugs seems to have diminished, but the cumbersome interface remains :(. What is also very annoying is when you go to the podshow home page loud music starts blasting through your speakers and a truckload of commercials start flashing :(. Especially the Casino ones make it look like a cheap site (you know the ones you stumble upon when you mistype www.yahoo.com ;)).
Basically I am missing the whole point of podshow plus. I dont need their media player (which doesnt work properly on 2 of my systems btw) since I already have iTunes (or any other mp3 player will do just as well, probably better, their player ofcourse has an annoying ad on the bottom). And I certainly dont need the channel of your favourite podcasts, since not all podcasts are in there and I dont want one big feed making a mess of things.
Apparently I am not the only one who thinks this, got some nice reviews below.
http://kiwibloke.wordpress.com/2006/07/08/10-things-why-podshow-is-lame/
http://www.podcastnyc.net/blog/
There are a lot more, just do a technoratti search and a lot of posts will show up ;).