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TechCrunch: The Wal-Mart of Web App Reviews

Remember when the tech blog TechCrunch was all done by founder Michael Arrington, and in even the sketchiest product review, you could at least count on him for some insider knowledge? Well the site’s gone big, and it ain’t that special any more.

Take this review of Dodgeball and Twitter, for example. Writer Blake Robinson has, like, four Twitter friends, and he clearly hasn’t used Dodgeball. He proves the ignorance of the two mass-messaging services with his own screenshots. Blake treats the two services as competitors, even though Dodgeball is used for announcing location and Twitter is used for quipping or microblogging. (In other words, you use Dodgeball to announce you’re at the bar. You use Twitter to repeat what your drunk friend just whispered to you.) In fact, many of Dodgeball’s core users joined Twitter and now use both services.

But back to this useless TechCrunch review. The facts are wrong (you can use something other than SMS with Dodgeball). The analysis is wrong (Facebook’s web-based business model would make a Twitter clone an annoying side project). It’s just rubbish, and it’s clogging up a site that’s usually quite useful for tech news scoops. So all that to say: until TechCrunch hires some reviewers who bother to use the product, don’t trust a TechCrunch product review.

This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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