Anti-Social Formula 1?
During this week’s show we discussed the pending launch of official social networking sites from F1 teams Honda and Renault.
In the end, little came of earthdreams.info, but as our discussion was mostly based on speculation we can’t really blame the team for that. It may still happen, but at the moment it doesn’t look as though there will be much social dreaming from Honda in the short term.
Fan Site
Renault on the other hand did manage to launch their site. I couldn’t access it until today, a full two days after its promised debut, but I’m in now and that’s all that matters.
My first impression is that it’s a little bit underwhelming. My own stupidity got the better of me when I struggled to create an account because “United Kingdom” wasn’t on the list of available countries. Eventually I twigged that “Royaume-Uni” was the choice I needed and access was granted.
It’s here that the problems really started though, because while I can happily upload images and create new blog posts, everything appears to require moderation. Even uploading an avatar becomes a very slow process - one hour after sending a picture, I’m still looking at the default image. I appreciate the need to prevent copyright infringement, but a little trust wouldn’t go amiss.
Beyond the usability problems, there isn’t much else to shout about at the moment. It’s a fun experiment and I’m glad the team are trying, but essentially there’s just not much to do on there right now. This isn’t the revolution we were hoping for.
All is not Lost
There’s a small light at the end of the tunnel though, because with uncanny timing Ram Rao commented on F1 Minute earlier today, suggesting that we should check out Force India’s official fan club, known as Club Force.
Now this site is more like it. Registration is easy, updates are instant and there’s plenty to play around with, including calendars, groups and video uploads. You don’t have to log in to look around and our mini site should be available to all.
We’re still experimenting with this one, it has the potential to be a great fan resource and we’ll no doubt be discussing it more during the show next week.
Others
If there are any other team sites we should be looking at, or you think are worth promoting please do let us know in the comments.
Also if you’re already using any of the above, please add us as friends and tell us what we’ve missed.
Update: If you’re looking for our Renault fan site profile, you’ll find it here.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:27 amme said:
is it my eyes, or is “renault” spelt incorrectly in that screenshot?
January 30th, 2008 at 12:53 pmOllie said:
Yeah, they’ve added an extra ‘L’ to Renault - tut tut.
This all looks interesting, I’ll shall be having a poke around later. I’ve known about Club Force India and they seem fairly gun-ho about creating a social environment for fans. Do you think the teams are finally cottoning on to the fact that the majority of F1’s fanbase use the internet frequently and they’ve been missing out on a large market for a while?
January 30th, 2008 at 2:28 pmF1Wolf said:
I had several guys promotion the ClubForce, different names, different email addresses, same text … I bit too spammy for my taste… but the Force India official website is pretty good …
January 30th, 2008 at 2:47 pmme said:
ooh, didn’t realise that.
in this case it was good spam, because it was news to me. but we’ll keep an eye on it. cheers.
January 30th, 2008 at 4:36 pmme said:
on a similar note. nice article on Pitpass today, regarding the guy behind renault’s old blog (rf1pp).
i thought he’d left already, but apparently tomorrow will be his last day. i do hope the guy remains in f1 in some capacity.
January 30th, 2008 at 7:42 pmRich said:
I tried to make an account - but after accepting my account details it promptly broke with an immense amount of code after greeting me with my user name. I mean it really broke won’t let me in now - possibly it was upset that neither Renault (or that new team Renaullt) nor Alonso were my favourite team and driver respectively. I think the French country names might confuse a few (we are Africa du Sud!). I think we need to wish them luck on this - and hopefully their 2008 race track contender is rather better sorted out than their website (and faster - it was kinda slow!)
January 30th, 2008 at 7:57 pmme said:
well, you gave it a go, eh?
given that the site was two days late going live, i get the impression that it’s a little bit rushed. they need a lot more than luck with this one.
on the plus side my avatar was finally accepted. i was trying to think back to the last time anyone moderated an avatar but i can’t think of a single occasion.
January 30th, 2008 at 9:24 pmRich said:
Yea - I found that the combination of Firefox and an Apple Mac was fatal. I had to go down memory lane and use Windows with IP and it worked! Could not find your profile or indeed anyone who supported anything but Renault. The moderation of an Avatar is something I would have expected of McLaren not Renault. There has not been an overwhelming number of accounts sixty - so a slow start. Not to knock Renault, theirs and Williams’ Podcasts were really good last year. The Force India site is better sorted out technically (has a problem with modification of theme, it logs you out too quickly and the searching is “work in progress” as they have not defined much in the way of variables). The Force India does asks strange questions with strange drop down responses - so my profile reads Relationship:Swinger; Children: Don’t Know; Body Type: More to love; Religion: Primal Indigenous and Ethnicity: Undead! I did not give an answer to whether I was straight, gay or bisexual as its too obvious with a choice like that I have to be bisexual to go with the rest of the profile. What the Force India lacks in terms of overall design integration it makes up with its fun factor and it seems to have a lot of subscribers! Seriously, once Renault have sorted out their problems it looks to be better looking and conceived (having dual language does add complexity which was probably unnecessary!)
Hope you are both feeling better
January 30th, 2008 at 9:29 pmlou said:
re: Rich’s comment
The same happened to me! it set up an account, and its there on the member list but now not letting me login. so its not only they car they need to sort out, its the website too!
January 30th, 2008 at 10:28 pmme said:
i think this is our public profile.
i do worry about the amount of moderation though.
i see one of our pictures has been accepted now, thing is i already got bored and moved on. much rather they allowed everything, then removed dubious stuff later.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:59 pmme said:
something else i don’t really understand, but that sounds quite exciting is the ability to upload podcasts. there’s a file size limit but no time limit.
in theory i could upload a very long (and very poor quality) audio file. would someone have to listen to the whole thing just to make sure nothing dodgy was said and no commercial tunes were played?
i can’t find anything in the t&c about it, but if the moderator says it’s okay, does that mean renault are taking full responsibility for the content?
i already see some copyrighted images uploaded, so maybe the moderation is just a roadblock, rather than someone checking every single detail.
thoughts?
January 30th, 2008 at 11:00 pmme said:
lou, i think i’ve added you as a friend. the site seems to have settled down a little now.
January 31st, 2008 at 5:46 amF1Wolf said:
It was a bit of pain in the back side, but I made it
Profile here
why it speaks to me in French when I selected English, and why it keeps forcing me to name Alonso as my favourite Renault driver still remains a mystery
January 31st, 2008 at 8:05 amme said:
you may have discovered the subliminal advertising campaign renault have implemented to ensure we all know which driver has no.1 status this year.
January 31st, 2008 at 8:13 amRich said:
Hi will respond to the moderation, first this is policy I am not sure what form of content management they are using but if properly thought out moderation should simply be set as an option for any significant field. It definitely takes the spontaneity out of the site. Of a bigger worry is the lack of obvious security measures - you can make an account with an email verification (dangerous) and there are also no captchas. Both of which I would have done and finally (these are easy to implement if you are using PHP. As I entered from a French Drop down menu it is more than likely it will continue to record my country as Africa du Sud. In My Humble Opinion it is about two weeks off being ready for the public and all of last night fairly major changes were being made.
January 31st, 2008 at 6:45 pmlou said:
Thanks
i will check, see if it will let me log in today
January 31st, 2008 at 8:05 pmlou said:
I’m not sure if i am doing someting wrong, but it STILL wont let me log in! I enter my username and password and click ok and nothing seems to happen. It still has login and register at the top. :S
January 31st, 2008 at 9:31 pmRich said:
The Renault site did go down this evening - they are actually make continuous changes to sort out problems as they arise - not great project management! At least I NOW do not have Alonso as my favourite Renault driver!
January 31st, 2008 at 9:33 pmlou said:
January 31st, 2008 at 9:38 pmme said:
sounds like last season all over again.
lou, did you break their website? c’mon you can tell us.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:49 pmlou said:
haha, maybe….. *looks shifty*