A Critical Review of Zappl

After many delays, Zappl.com has finally launched. Zappl was originally proposed as a sort of Twitter-like "microblogging" service that would be built on top of the Steem blockchain and let people directly earn rewards for their normal Tweeting behavior. Zappl raised money from the Steemit community some months back, and then after a series of delays, the website version finally launched a couple days ago. Apparently the mobile app versions are still delayed.

Now: Did we get what we paid for?

I realize that Zappl is still in Beta, and that they didn't actually raise all that much money, and that we only actually know of one developer working probably-not-full-time on the project. I also realize that on some level, I'm comparing Zappl to Twitter -- and Twitter is polished to an expensive shine. Also, I don't think Zappl actually raised much money -- maybe $50k or something like that? That said, I can't help but be disappointed with several aspects of the Zappl service.

The Good

The website seems to work. You can log in, you can post "zaps," you can post comments on other peoples' stuff, you can follow people, etc. Here's a screenshot of a zap I posted from my alt account @philipnbrown; check it out yourself at https://zappl.com/#!/@philipnbrown.

The Bad

I've been told that Zappl actually stores your password on their site if you log in with your Steemit password. so DON'T LOG IN WITH YOUR PASSWORD, because if Zappl's security isn't good, then bad guys can hack them, steal your password, and use it to steal all your money. If you want to use Zappl, LOG IN WITH YOUR POSTING KEY. If you don't know what that means, don't use Zappl.

If you're a POCKET user, even if you log in with your posting key, Zappl will have access to your POCKET tokens. So please keep that in mind if you're deciding whether or not to use Zappl.

Also, even though it works, the website doesn't really work well. You get a lot of the spinny circle thing:

The "Meh"

The entire thing seems really... un-creative. Here's part of what I mean. When you write a post, you get this dialog bog:

Why is there a "Title" field? Zappl doesn't display the titles of posts. It seems like it would make a lot of sense not to make users enter a title that's just going to disappear in the blockchain anyway. Maybe the dev thought we'd want to put the title in so that it would display nicely on Steemit? But then what if I don't want to litter my Steemit blog with little posts about how I felt about my breakfast porridge?

Zappl.com appears to be mostly a Twitter-themed clone of Steemit.com, and that feels disappointing to me. I was hoping it would be more of a Twitter clone that uses the Steem blockchain to store some stuff. It would be really nice to use my main account on Zappl without it messing with how it works on Steemit. What if there's someone who is an awesome Zapper that I want to follow on Zappl, but I don't want their Zaps filling up my Steemit feed? Then I'm completely out of luck, because if you follow someone on Zappl, you're automatically also following them on Steemit. It would have been super cool for Zappl to have a separate "follow" so that your actions on one platform don't screw with your experience of the other platform.

So there you have it. I had a picture of Zappl being a new app with interesting and innovative functionality, but it's basically just a new front-end for Steem's basic features. Maybe I'm being much too harsh, but it seems to me that we've seen some more interesting things come from un-funded projects (DTube, DSound, ChainBB, etc), and my hope was that the money that Zappl has raised would lead to some cool innovations.