sickofmusic.com

Well, I stumbled across this website when my brother told me about this product. Basically Gizmoz offers a nice product which helps create online gags and an IM plugin for the “Talking Headz”.

Lets start with the basic’sâ€¦

Registration process was pretty easy and i didn’t have to provide much details (I hate doing thatâ€¦) , After the process was done i was ready to create my first on-line gag using the online creator they have. You can select from a gallery or create your own Talking Head using the online creator based on flash (I selected a head from a list). The creator itself is a bit messy, For something that you need to move in 1,2,3. I had trouble finding the numbers in order to move around according to the process but eventually i managed to create my head. Although it didn’t playâ€¦ Why ? I have no idea but after a long wait I got a glimpse of the head and hitting play simply made the screen go black.

The recording process worked perfectly but i didn’t use it and went for the Text to speech feature. I don’t really know if it works or not because i wasn’t able to make the head play. (Notice i am on firefox and that might be the deal). They also use an activex div that displays an overlay on top of the flash and presents an unfinished gag. Why not preview it inside the flash with FLV format you ask? the ActiveX media player is so old news and it has trouble with browsers other then Internet Explorer.

Wondering around the website, viewing the gags is pretty nice and has a lot of social features like sharing a clip and embedding the clip in your posts and websites. Although its not a classic social because they utilize Windows Media Active X that i certainly hate and isn’t cross platform compliant as Flash is. You can rate a clip and Tag it for future use and other users can view clips by tags. A Youtube for Online Generated Gags. Its pretty nice i gatto tell ya that. The Look and feel and the animation is smooth. The facial expressions is amazing. They also build on top of other social websites and promote the content by using “Digg it” button, smart move if you ask me. Why fight them when you can join them.

If we really want to digg-in the website i can say that the coding ain’t heaven, They use a lot of table html that in along term will overload the server and produce a high volume of traffic (1 simple table with 1 line equals 5 lines of code = 1 div of line), But apart from that I miss the social aspect of the user. When i click a publisher I’d like to see more then the Posted gags he did, Maybe a nice avatar and a bit of info about the user itself. Some tagged words the user inserted. I’m not saying go full blown social with PM messages but I really sat and looked for the comment area for a few minutes until i realized i cannot comment on a clip at all. Even Youtube lets you video comment, If you want to be the Youtube of gagz you must give users the ability to comment on an entry apart from ranking it.

All and all its a nice website and some of the clips there are pretty funny. Its not used for Online Helpers like the other company Oddcast. Most of the work is done on the back end server that produces and renders the head gags. It has a social website with a PC client for the heavy users that c an create rich content and an online creator / IM plugin.i haven’t tried yet but im sure its well done also from what i’v heard.

I give them 5 thumbs up for doing a really great job. I dunno how muchtime they invested in this product but its well done and looks like a lot of effort was put into it in order to deliver the audience with a well crafted product with great design and nice features.