Gather.com came to limelight from nowhere, thanks to Boston Globe and then tech.memeorandum. It is a shame that what stood out was the 7M dollar investment and the 23 people they employed - not the website or the concept itself.
So what is new in Gather.com? Nothing. Boston Globe hailed the advertisement revenue sharing as if it is the greatest invention since the light bulb. In reality, this is a shoddy little plan to make a few bucks from other people’s content. I can always add advertisements to my blogspot or wordpress blog and retain all of the revenue . Not only that, these services also allow me to modify the look of my page any which way I want. Just compare my blogspot blog to my gather profile. The later looks horrible with all the junk on the left and right. There is no easy way to upload images and the WYSIWIG editor they have is lame. One of the buttons in the top of WYSIWIG editor shows the licence given to gather.com by some third-party provider. This shows that even with 7m in investment these guys could not even buy let alone create a decent WYSIWIG wrapper.
It hurts to see how some influential people are able to raise so much money and employ a big team to deliver software without any consideration for the user, and still manage to feature in Boston Globe. At the same time, there are many entrepreneurs writing their heart out through software, giving everything to the end users, and still struggling for acceptance from press and VCs. Well, the world is not a fair place and this is no exception.
