I took a look at a new social networking site today that lets you connect with people based on the “stuff” in your life. The site is called Acobay and I think it needs to make some improvements before it can become a premiere consumer network. I signed up and tried to upload an avatar photo, I received an error because my photo was too large. Had I known the photo was going to be too large I would not have attempted to upload it. It wasn’t until I received the error that I saw the file size limitation. The same thing happened when I tried to upload a photo of my car, but that time I received no indication of the maximum file size possible. I got frustrated with the site very quickly.

Eventually I posted a few photos of my stuff, well just my cell phone and then went to try and connect with people, not easy, not intuitive but could be improved. For one thing there are symbols all over the site and there isn’t any alternate text or tool tips that appear when you mouse over the images. Having something as simple as that would have gone very far towards making the site more user friendly. More work needs to be done to the site to make it better but the idea is interesting and might be worth another look when the interface is a bit more refined.