Odeo (pronounced Odd-E-O, not like Oreo) wants to be a one-stop shop for everything podcasting, offering everything from easily finding podcasts to creating them and selling ads for them. For the most part it meets its goals. It does some things very well but misses the boat on others.

I’ll skim over Odeo’s listening features. They are nice but my interest is in creating not consuming content.

Odeo has a well organized podcast directory, with a pretty good collection of titles. You can easily subscribe to content on the Odeo site and then synchronize your subscriptions with iTunes. It has a lot of competition here. Even though podcasts are still a new phenomenon to most people, there are plenty of good ways to subscribe. With feed readers, online aggregators and iTunes it needs more to stand out. As nice a job as Odeo does of presenting podcasts, its just another directory. It may or may not appeal to you. Fortunately, Odeo does offer more.

The current web fad seems to be social networking sites and Odeo plays that game. You can create a profile and read the profiles of other users. There are the expected Top lists and recent additions. There are also channels, contacts and subscriptions so you can be social. All seem well implemented.

Odeo has a Widget. From the website:

The Odeo Player is a free Apple Widget that makes it easier to listen to your favorite shows. If you have an Odeo account, the Player gives you quick and easy access to the shows in your Queue. If you don’t have an Odeo account, just enter a custom feed to hear your favorite podcasts.

Nice but still just a Widget. What Odeo offers that make it special are some easy-to-use tools that allow you to easily create your own audio content, or Odeo content.

Want to be able to receive an audio email? Odeo has a copy and paste Flash player that you can drop into any web page. It will take audio input from your visitors computer, rip it into an mp3 then email you a link to the message. Nice.

Want to create your own podcasts? With an iBook or Powerbook you can go the the Odeo site, click a button and talk into your Mac’s built in microphone. Odeo creates a podcast, stores it on its site and gives you code to copy an paste into your site. If you don’t have a microphone you can even call a 415 area code number and record you phone call. Both methods limit your to three minutes, which is a very short time to get a message across.

Odeo is easier than creating podcasts on your own computer. I haven’t seen any desktop tools that make the process as simple. Even with the new podcasting feature in Garage Band, you have to record your piece, transfer it to iTunes, convert the file to an mp3,find the file on your hard drive, ftp to your site, then post the link to your blog. If you don’t use a blog with built in RSS generating capacity you also have to have another program to take care of that step. While none of the steps is that hard, it isn’t the easiest way to podcast. Of course, you get a lot more control with by recording yourself. It’s the typical tradeoff of simplicity vs. features.

If you do want to record your own files and post them to a server, Odeo is happy to create a channel with your content. So you aren’t limited to the ultra basic web based recorder or the three minute recording time.

Part of what makes the Odeo process simple is that the files are on Odeo’s server. You can download them if you want but it’s much easier to just use their service. Odeo embeds a small Flash player on your page that handles the podcast streaming. I find the player attractive. Hopefully Odeo will offer multiple player options as it does for email audio messages.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the website has some serious shortcomings. The Odeo people obviously think that the service is so easy to use that it needs no instrucions or tutorials. Not a good assumption. If I hand’t gotten such a strong recommendation to try the service I would have quit before I figured it out. When I showed Odeo to a friend, she also got confused.

The secret to using the site is that you need to subscribe before you get any meaningful information. Once you do and wait for an email that you have to open to confirm your subscription, then some useful but inconsistently applied navigation appears. There’s still no help links or documentation pages. There are simple lists of Tips on the each Create page, but they aren’t very thorough. Separate and more complete documention would be nice, as would the ability to navigate the site from any page. Don’t look to the faq. It has no technical information. I seem to remember seeing that it’s possible to record a two-way phone conversation but I can’t find out where I read that.

Conclusion: good product, poor documentation and terrible navigation. I understand that there are a couple other similar services. I’ll check them out before I recommend Odeo.

Odeo.com

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 6:32 am and is filed under Audio, Software Review, Web Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.