I haven't been using EntreCard much lately. I believe its glory days are over. I thought it was a great idea in the beginning. There was once a time when I met a lot of new people and got some decent traffic from EntreCard. Unfortunately, that didn't last very long. Now, EntreCard seems filled with spammy sites and people trying to abuse the system. It is too hard to weed through the junk to find anything of value or worth reading. In an effort to correct this, it appears that EntreCard has changed the rules (again) - which I thought they should have done a long time ago. Now, I fear it is too little too late.

The Decline of EntreCard

In the beginning, EntreCard was a good service. I thought the concept was great on a small scale, but questioned its viability as a long term, scalable model. Six months ago, I wrote a post explaining why I thought EntreCard was doomed. I thought that there were simply TOO MANY EntreCard credits getting created, which threatened the value of a single credit. Graham Langdon, EntreCard's founder, responded to my post explaining why their model will work for the long run. A few months later, they changed the rules to make blog advertising prices increase by a power of 2 for each person waiting to advertise on a site. Now, a few months later, they are changing the rules again. Clearly something is not working, and to anyone who has been using the service for a while, this has been quite obvious.

The New Rules

So here are the new rules, as delivered to the inbox of all EntreCard users a few minutes ago.

1. Buy credits for less: Entrecard is now selling 1,000 credits for $6.00. You can buy them here: http://entrecard.com/r/buy_credits
   
2. More pricing increments: Instead of prices doubling every time, there are now a few more steps. The new price points can be found on the Advertising page in the wiki, here: http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=advertising
   
3. Members are not allowed to sell credits: This goes for ebay sales, posts in the Marketing forum, and posts on other forums. If you have references on your site to the sale of credits, please remove them immediately, as it is now against our terms.
   
4. Credit transfer limits: Members are allowed to make a maximum of 14 credit transfers a week, up to a maximum of 1,000 credits, whichever comes first. This means you can still run contests where you give credits away for free, and under 1k per week. Note: This does not affect linked blogs, you can transfer unlimited credits between linked blogs.
   
5. Transfer tax: From now on, all transfers, including transfers made with our new payments API, will be taxed at a rate of 12.5%. The taxed credits will be sold to members (see #1).
   
6. Blogs cannot be unlinked: Once you link a blog, it's there for good unless you ask us to delete the blog from your account. This prevents linking/unlinking to get around the credit transfer limits, and it also stops you losing access to a blog if you unlink it in error, which happens a lot.
   
7. No more coupons: You are no longer allowed to send coupons.
   
8. Shop closed: Except for Entrecard upgrades (Featured Status, Fast Pass) the Entrecard Shop is now offline until further notice. Please do not request a seller token until the shop returns. When it comes back, it will be bigger and better. We'll communicate more details nearer the time.

According to EntreCard, the above changes are being made due to their declining financial situation. Their email continues to say:

We hope that, by taking the steps we have, we will be able to reach a good balance between maximizing the overall benefits for our users and getting the revenue we need to pay the bills and expand the service.

The Only True Fix

These changes are clearly trying to make the value of an EntreCard credit more valuable. Why? So they can be sold to make the company money. As I mentioned earlier, I think these changes are too little too late. However, there is one thing that I think can save the declining service. Instead of using rules to affect the value of a credit, let the users decide how valuable a credit should be on a given site.  EntreCard should take a note from Digg and other successful social media sites that use community voting to decide on the popularity of blog. If EntreCard allowed the users to "vote" on the value of a blog, which in turn determined the price to advertise on that blog - irregardless of the number of "drops" that blog gets - I believe a lot of spammy, junky, blogs that are clogging up the service will be pushed to the backseat. Perhaps drops from blog owners with a High Rating become more valuable than from crappy blogs that are just trying to game the system. EntreCard needs to decouple the quality of the site with the act of "dropping cards". It is the only way to ensure that high quality content is being judged for that reason and that reason alone.

I am not trying to suggest a new business model for EntreCard. All I know is that, in my opinion, the biggest problem with EntreCard is the number of worthless, annoying sites that have flooded its system. If the service implemented some type of community approval and ratings system for the quality of the content, I believe the service would do much, much better.

What do you guys think? How many of you out there still like EntreCard the way it is? Would you enjoy it more if you able to intereact with higher quality blogs with better content?

Jeff

ps - EntreCard, feel free to send me a check for my consulting services.

If anyone has been using Digg much lately, I am sure they must have noticed the recent saga regarding Digg user MrBabyMan. Some of the highest Dugg stories over the last couple days were simple images and Twitter posts (tweets) asking for MrBabyMan to be banned for his excessive digging.

Well it looks like Digg actually listened to their users and reacted quickly. In an effort to put the kibosh on massive rapid Digging, Digg has put in place controls to make sure you're not Digging too fast.

I would like to thank my anonymous, mysterious friend for submitting the above image. How he came across it, I have no clue. 

Looks like everyone will have to go back to making friends the old fashioned way...by actually reading each other's content and getting know one and other.  

Jeff

I spent a little time getting familiar with Plurk the other night. I have to admit, it is amazingly addicting. Its a lot like Twitter, but much more social. In my opinion, Plurk can be described as the younger, gabby, outgoing sibling of Twitter.

How Plurk Works

In my book, what makes a good Web 2.0 application is one that has figured out how to manage tons of information in an easy to use interface. In this regard, Plurk has done an amazing job. Plurk's "About" page defines Plurk as:

A really snazzy site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life in deliciously digestible chunks. Low in fat, 5 calories per serving, yet chock full of goodness. 

In the simplest form, it is a lot like Twitter in that you've got 140 characters in which to Microblog something. Unlike Twitter, you can choose up to 16 different verbs. Where Twitter always answers the question "What are you doing?", Plurk allows you to change the question to "JeffBuzz [says, is, loves, wants, hates, has,...etc.]". Plurk also allows you to post smiley faces or even images from Flickr (very scaled down, of course).

Instead of your Plurks (as opposed to your Tweets) coming in vertically, as they do on Twitter, they come in horizontally along a scrollable timeline. This takes a little getting used to at first. For some reason the timeline reads right to left which, to me, seems unnatural. I guess my Westernized mind is more comfortable reading it left to right. Its very cool how you can just click and pull the timeline to the left to view Plurks back in time.

Except for a few minor nuances, Plurk sounds pretty much the same as Twitter so far, right? Here is where Plurk gets real crazy...on each individual Plurk you can leave a response and form a discussion. See what I mean about managing tons of data? Not only are you seeing all of your friends' Plurks, but you can also see the discussion on each one! The result is an application that is a lot like Twitter, but much more social. Check out the screenshot below.

There really isn't much to dislike about Plurk. My biggest complaint is that it is another time-suck that will distract me from focusing on what I should be doing! The payoff could be worth it though. Because of the social nature of the service, I find it much easier to meet people and establish friendships than Twitter. Because its so easy to exchange messages with people, the friendships actually mean something, unlike many other social media apps where you have no clue who you are adding as a "friend".

Within 5 minutes of using Plurk, I had my first friend. When I saw who it was, I must say...I immediately became hooked.

I still like Twitter for its simplicity. But when I have time to kill, there's a good bet you can find me on Plurk.

You can follow me on both Twitter and Plurk:

http://twitter.com/JeffBuzz
http://plurk.com/user/JeffBuzz

Jeff