Keep Tabs on Your Friends With PeopleBrowsr - Performance
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As with all services or software in its early stages, you have to expect a few bumps in the road in terms of service. That being said, PeopleBrowsr’s performance has greatly improved over the last few months as more services were integrated and more tools piled on, all while trying to make the flow a little less overwhelming. Let’s face it; upon first viewing of PeopleBrowsr, a user can be more than a little intimidated. The massive spread of information suddenly available is a little scary, but the service is working out its kinks to make the site more approachable to those not familiar with similar applications such as TweetDeck.
PeopleBrowsr is actually quite admirable in its acceptance of constructive criticism. If new users have any complaints about the service’s performance or if they encounter any problems, they are encouraged to contact PeopleBrowsr and make them aware of it so that tweaks and updates can be made.
One of the major problems users may run into in terms of performance is difficulty sorting contacts by tag or adding people to groups. This of course is a major performance flaw when considering the fact that the grouping feature is one of the most highly touted benefits on the site. Surely many have successfully tagged contacts and added people to groups, but many users have complained of being unable to figure out how to do this because of the complicated interface. Also, the site uses a lot of Twitter terminology where Twitter terminology doesn’t really seem to fit; this is just another thing to keep an eye out for.
It’s not all gloom and doom for PeopleBrowsr though. For an alpha, the service is remarkably stable. Both PCs and Macs are sure to encounter reasonably good results. As previously mentioned, the interface is a bit sketchy in certain spots, but the interface designers have done an excellent job of meticulously explaining -- to the best of their ability -- each feature with rollovers and a more than decent FAQ section.
It’s true that when leveraging all of the service’s tools, PeopleBrowsr can be more than a little overwhelming, which is what many thought of FriendFeed when it was first developed. There are so many different things you can do -- from viewing a friend's friends, to grouping people across networks, to tagging people or even seeing what other tags have been given to you. You can view people in a grid format and click on the avatars you know well, or you can view it in column mode, much like TweetDeck.
The secret to finding it useful is choosing the pace of updates, limiting the followers in each area and hiding networks from which you don't want updates.As the service said in a press release, "PeopleBrowser enables social media power users -- and the rest of us -- to concentrate energy in one place instead of wrestling with a distributed presence." Leaving PeopleBrowsr open all day long on your desktop allows it to act as your distribution point to your presences around the Web. In terms of performance, you can’t really ask more of the service than that.
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