I got my invite to Odeo earlier this evening, and from my cursory look-see, the service looks pretty good. The site is easy to navigate and use, and is presented in a very straightforward manner. I downloaded the Odeo Syncr app and gave it a try, but I also was very happy to note later that you don’t have to use it – you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of your subscriptions and use your normal feedreader to download the podcasts, which is probably what I’ll do.
There is an important feature that will likely be the next tempest in the blog-teapot – but that I think is totally cool and web-like. The site is to a great extent simply organizing links to podcasts that already exist elsewhere, so the original show stays only on the site it came from. At least that is the case for content that has not been expressly put into Odeo by its creator. You can be sure that there’s going to be some sort of outcry over this, but that will be misplaced to say the least.
Beyond that, the little inline Flash player is pretty good, and for some reason your subscription list is hidden and only accessible via the Sync section. It really should be a site-wide sidebar item or something.
Anyhow… I can’t wait to see the content creation tools, and maybe soon I’m going to have to motivate myself to do something in this medium. Or maybe I’ll just convince Nadia to give it a try – after all, she’s the all-pro radio host in the family. I’m sure her skills would translate very well to podcasting!
Boris Anthony says
Oh no. Did you say “Syncr”?!
I remember an IM convo with Stewart a few months ago where I said something like “let the ‘*cr’ names begin!” …
;)
Can you believe I was lucky enough to be spared an odeo invite? *cough*