iPodarmy

Overall it’s a nice little service/application. I wasn’t able to get into the podcast creation stuff, as that’s not ready yet, but I did take a spin around everything else. Here are my first impressions.

Notes and Observations

• The design and interface are slick. Is pink the new pink?
• It’s kind of like Flickr. You can make comments and tag podcasts with your own tags. I really like the tag based organization as it opens up a whole new way to find podcasts. This is a killer feature.
• I really like the listen features. It’s nice because it makes it easy to kind of, well, browse and “try before you subscribe.” This, again, is killer—I like to be able to easy listen to a show, before I decide I want to add it to my download queue.
• The queue is kind of neat, it allows you to add individual podcasts without subscribing. This would be good to line up new shows to check out.
• Adding a show was pretty easy and allowed for a bit more in the way of describing a show (via tags, etc.) than most other directories out there.
• You can look at other people’s profiles and see what channels and shows they are subscribing to or have in their queue, where they’ve made comments and what those are and what, if anything, their producing. This is another nice way to discover something new. You can check out what your friends or people with similar tastes have found.
• You can then add them as a contact (again ala Flickr) to help keep track of what their up to.

I think in general the most impressive part of Odeo was the way it helps you find new shows to listen to. The fact that you can tag and comment on shows, as well as listen to and line up shows to check out are like nothing else that I’ve seen. I can see those features being very useful.

I also quite liked all the user features. If they can get a community going around it, it could be a very, very good thing.