Scrapplet: anything this ugly has to be a consumer play

Scrapplet is a new service that allows users to mash content from other sites onto the one page. Louis Gray has a great review of the service here.

Robert Scoble chimes in, suggesting that it’s a difficult service to explain, and not particularly consumer friendly.

Maybe it’s the trauma I’m still suffering from trying to do some Christmas Shopping this morning, but I must be looking at a different service to Robert, because what I found is completely the opposite. This service is so consumer oriented it would likely not appeal to first adopters and geeks.

The concept is simple enough: drag and drop stuff on the page so you get a new page of embedded elements, anything from pics through to embedded pages themselves. You can even add text.

The result is the most god awful looking thing I’ve seen since Geocities circa 1996.

Actually, no, that’s unfair to Geocities, and I put a lot of effort into my Geocities page back then to make it look good.

The results speak for themselves. These aren’t pages made by first adopters or geeks. These are pages made by people with little idea for web design, who think flashing animated gifs are cool.

It’s 110% a consumer play.

Will it work though? Maybe. It’s simple, provides a service, and no doubt people will like the mash made simple idea. I’m rating it a win.

Here’s a few pages from the site. The most popular, perhaps not ironically is this one. My advice is to not consume food when clicking the link.