Amazee: All Goals No Substance

Amazee is a new service that tries to be a one stop source for people seeking to achieve their goals. It takes ideas from such sites as 43 Things, World of Warcraft and Basecamp and mashes them into what it wants to be a one stop shop to achieve your goals and complete projects in a more interactive and innovative way.

Where I first heard about Amazee and the premise behind it, I was intrigued. A site that combined gaming-style interaction, goals, team work, a fan base and more sounded like a great way to use the social web to get more done. I had visions of intense collaboration and interaction online with the goal of achieving common goals, ideas, dreams or projects.

The hit list of features is a rich one: discussions, team members for your project, fans, a wiki for each project, to-do lists, project magazines to publish your project process and results, the ability to gain corporate sponsors for your project and more. It's hard not to get excited when you see that list of features.

Logging in, the first thing I noticed was the interface. It is very plain. While there is nothing wrong with plain and simple visual impact, with a site like this I must admit I expected something more intuitive, something that visually told you right away what the site was for. If I had not been briefed going in what Amazee was all about, it would have taken too much time to figure it all out.

You can search for existing projects, and the site offers ways to filter by language. I'm not sure if it is because there is mostly German content in the private beta, or if it is because that feature is not yet fully functional, but I continually got German content. There isn't anything wrong with German, but since I don't speak that language it was a bit frustrating.

On each project you see a project graphic, a synopsis of the project, a series of project stats like number of team members, number of fans, vote count, etc. Across the top of each project is a tab bar for navigating around the project dynamic. For something that wants so much to be social, the navigation feels surprisingly old school and not very fresh and innovative.

When starting your own project, you have several options to choose from for access: closed (invite only), open (open to all Amazee members) and open with approval. The initial set up is quite clear, and only takes a few moments to complete. It takes longer to write a concise, exciting blurb describing your idea than it does to get everything set up, making the project set up section the most reliable part of the site so far.

Once your project is set up you are taken to your dashboard, where you can invite people to your team, send announcements, ask for sponsorship and more. The sponsorship options are intriguing, made up of money, volunteer work or other ideas that potential sponsors come up with. It's an innovative way to get people involved.

Overall, Amazee falls a bit short of their admittedly ambitious mark. Fortunately, the people behind the idea are accessible and enthusiastic, which should help them make their idea more accessible in turn. The strong aspects of their site show they have what it takes to translate their ideas into manageable bites, and they will have to find a way to do it in order to succeed against existing heavy hitters in the idea business, like 37 Signals and Basecamp.