Some more updates from ezboard’s CEO, Robert Labatt, in his WordPress “CEO Blog” on ezboard and on his own Yuku “blorum”. I’ll deal with the Yuku updates in a separate post as this one will be fairly lengthy.

ezboard’s Customer Services [sic] staff have been doing their best to ‘rubbish’ the ezboard platform for a while now, as did Rob Labatt in one of his original blog entries on 7 March 2006 (referred to by Cincom as it was apparently critical of its product, Smalltalk, that ezboard was based upon). 

And yet now we have Labatt saying:

“Well, today ezbaord has more features than Yuku.”

Given ezboard, Inc.’s criticism of, er, ezboard and given that ezboard has been working on Yuku for what, 18 months now, wouldn’t you expect Yuku to have at least as many features as ezboard by now? The same Yuku that ezboard heralded when they lost all that data in May/June 2005. The same Yuku that was launched as “available today” at DEMOfall in September 2005.

So after all this time developing Yuku, Labatt says they’re building new message boards “right now”, presumably having spent the last 18 months faffing about with user profiles? Surely the core element of Yuku must be its message board system? He goes on to say that they will be faster, although he doesn’t state what Yuku will be faster than. Presumably he means faster than ezboard rather than faster than competing products like vBulletin. I made a post on another message board comparing a like-for-like visit to a thread within a forum on Yuku and another at the same level on a vBulletin installation:

“Let’s see how fast it is from a new browser instance (already opened) navigating to http://help.yuku.com then the busy bug reporting forum followed by the first non-sticky thread.

I am on a 2MB ADSL connection here in the UK with only a 20:1 contention ratio. This is with Firefox on a PC.

Not bad today: 38 seconds.

For comparison, I went to a vBulletin installation I have running on a shared server. I entered the URL of the board, then clicked on a forum and the first non-sticky thread.

7 seconds.”

So it looks like Yuku still needs some significant work to make it faster and more feature-packed than even ezboard was. Hmm. What about Rob Labatt’s CEO Blog entry on 14 March 2006 where he writes:

“Ceco and his team are working to make Yuku faster and we are developing new features every week.”

Oh dear…

Labatt then goes on to say that once they’ve finished writing the message boards – “this summer” – they will then build the board import tools. But wait: didn’t ezboard say on 13 March 2006 that:

“In the next few weeks there will an easy to follow Free Board migration process available in Yuku.”

and

“In the next few weeks there will an easy to follow Gold Board migration process available in Yuku.”

and

“During the next two months we will help you move your board over…”

Yes, yet again, the promised timescales and milestones from Rob Labatt continue to drift and pass by without being met.

Back to the Bizarre Land of Yuku/ezboard then with the next statement from Rob’s latest CEO Blog entry:

“What you see on Yuku today is not what you will see in a few months.  So don’t go making plans based on what you see today.”

Yes, this is also the line being trotted out on the Yuku Help [sic] Forums whenever anyone takes a look at Yuku and declares themselves unhappy with the ‘look and feel’, speed or other aspect of Yuku.

And yet, Yuku was launched back in September 2005 and ezboard users were actively encouraged to go and give it a try. Indeed, users visiting their ezboard user control panels presently will see an import/export button to create a matching Yuku profile that can be used on Yuku. Why bother showing someone something only to say that it won’t be like that when it’s finished? And why bother developing and supporting something that’s apparently going to change so significantly? Unless, of course, the users are starting or continuing to vote with their feet…

And didn’t Rob Labatt also write in his CEO Blog entry on 14 March 2006 that:

“Personally, I think we are a month or so away from the time that you will look at Yuku and say ‘wow, I need to be there’.”

More than three months later, it seems that even Labatt himself still isn’t wowed by Yuku…