Sam Davyson

When I first found the Odeo service around a month ago I was amazed. I could record a basic podcast straight on to the site, and in the same place I could get all my favourite podcasts aggregated. And of course because it is a web service I can then get all of my podcasts from any computer in the world. Not only that but it also serves as an answerphone where people can send me audio messages.

A very nice idea. But Odeo fails.

I love the user interface in general. I think that the pink design that they have opted for is lovely. Look for instance at what happens when you click the button to login. You get this beautiful panel appearing for you to enter your details and log in. Very, very swish. And this is just one example there are lots of pleasant things in the interface not least the player which I find to rarely stumble when playing audio which is a big boost for using Odeo rather than collecting the audio from the original source.

But despite all of the good bits Odeo falls down in just a few areas, and these few holes make it unusable. This mainly center around its repeated ability to choke on RSS feeds which is how all content is streamed into the service. Look at this screen capture for an example. The feed doesn’t have two episode five’s but Odeo thinks it does. And it will stream two copies into your “inbox” as a result. The number of episodes that there have been will also be inflated on the Odeo counter. The number one gripe is the slow speed at which it recognises new episodes and updates feeds. It is terribly. You can navigate to the feeds page and ask for it to check again (it will periodically check by itself) and time after time it reports back that you haven’t got anything new to listen to. However if you pick up the RSS in a normal reader you can see the latest episode, and iTunes picks it up etc.

So if you want to stay in touch with the latest from your podcasts then you have to be prepared to be a day or so behind if you’re going to use Odeo, which in the world of tech is really not something anyone wants to be. I must admit though in the expanded service there are little bits that work brilliantly. The virtual answerphone works great and I see buttons all over the web for “Send me an Odeo“, I wonder if they should have stopped at that. The studio where you make your own podcast is not that bad either. It is pretty crude but it works and you can easily get content out. But right at the backbone of the service the break down of RSS means that as a whole service it is not a patch on iTunes for podcast management. Nice try, but no thanks.