I don't mean to be a hater, but that Flash on the home page has horrible usability. It's hard to click on the left items (with constant scrolling) and if you manage to click, the choices behind disappear but are still clickable? Also the choices on the right stop scrolling

It has potential, but the interface needs work.

Also some of the G's are cut off on the right side.

Started to sign up but stopped when it asked for my email.

Yeah, we go back and forth on that. We only use it currently to send you a confirmation. You can still login immediately though. OpenID is definitely in the road map.

I suppose we could allow you to login to a more restricted account (no spamming since we do have email/sms out support) until you validate in some way.

PG's advice is right. Take down all the fences -- you have less than 20 seconds to impress the user into staying on your site.

It's an attention economy -- asking for signup/login before providing real value = squandering that attention.

For TS we're trying to decide how to make sign-up dead simple. Since we want to support alerts and such, we'd like to simply use an e-mail/pw combo so that you only have to fill out 3 fields when you sign up (email/pw/pw confirm).

Do you have a better suggestion? Should we just specify why we ask for e-mail?

Maybe it's not high if people are buying something; they may expect to give an email in that situation. But you can A/B test to see exactly how many you're losing by asking for emails.

Give them a choice: https://ourdoings.com/reg.html

Actually, this service is pretty hot. I just signed up for it and what I really find attractive are the "springpad templates". Pretty cool, keeping an eye on it but not sure I'll integrate it into my daily life yet. Still hooked on OSX stickies + post-it notes on my monitor + Basecamp.

Why not use a wiki? My fave is Wikka: http://wikkawiki.org/HomePage

Disclaimer, I am a co-founder at springpadit.com.

The problem with a wiki, from my perspective, is the fact that it is unstructured. Some wiki's attempt to derive structure, or force users to use special syntax but that ends up being a little clunky. With structure comes some power. Tasks suddenly have meaning. A "Restaurant" data type can associate a map, or reviews. What we are trying to create is almost a personal content management system that helps users track all of that interesting structured data.

I am a fan of wiki's though. In fact I created

http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/

Many moons ago.

Tried to see what it was, found a clickable link to something that sounded interesting, but couldn't see a sample without registering; so I gave up immediately.

You don't allow for Safari 4? That's a shame: it's more stable than Safari 3 in a lot of ways, and I can't have both on my computer at once.

it looks like a well-executed service. as soon as the registration system is working again, i'm planning to give it a go.