31st
Is scribd the anti-christ, or am I missing something?
Sorry about the strong language, but I just can’t seem to tell you how much I detest scribd. Here are some reasons:
- It hates the web
- It routinely locks up and/or crashes my browser
- I don’t understand why it exists
- It makes the baby Jesus cry (okay, I’m a bit carried away there, but my browser just crashed thanks to scribd, so my apologies)
Unless I’m missing something, it seems like it lets you take documents (not just HTML) ones and upload them to a site where they can be “shared”. Well that sounds lovely, but note the quotes around “shared”. Because you might be fooled into thinking that the sharing was the kind of sharing of information for which the web was f!@#$#ing created, but you’d be oh-so-wrong.
Because your documents are embedded in a flash player, which means that they can’t be deep linked into in useful ways, or bookmarked inside of, or paged through with the full support of the browser (you have to hit these stupid forward and back buttons on the flash plugin). Oh, and, if it’s a good day, they crash the reader’s browser.
“It’s like YouTube for documents” seems to be the elevator pitch. But that’s the problem. The entire web is YouTube for documents. And it’s really, really good at it.
Hey, maybe I am missing something, but honestly, when I do a Google search, and I follow the first link, and it takes me to scribd, my immediate emotional response is “Oh, f!@#, not this crap again.”
Do other people like the scribd? Am I missing something which makes it good?
-Dan M
