Is The Entrebar Too Hot For You?

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, the long awaited Entrecard Toolbar is here and it’s smokin’ hot. That what Graham Langdon from Entrecard had to say. I say it's too hot for me to handle, so better I drop Entrecard altogether from my website.

For those who are new to Entrecard, Entrecard is an socio-economic network of bloggers, who regularly engage in transactions with each other using a virtual currency that is earned by for improving and promoting your blog. You can earn virtual currency when you comment on other blogs, visit other blogs, publish posts on your blog, and receive visitors. But unfortunately the way Entrecard has headed, I think they are not quite sure of their business strategies, or maybe they don't take their customers that seriously.

Now very recently, Entrecard had announced their latest invention, the Entre Bar or the Entrecard Toolbar. The main features of this toolbar is to help you do everything you do on Entrecard, but quickly. So imagine this, I open 10 Entrecard sites simultaneously, quickly drop the cards on each one of them and then open the next series.

Now the point of using Entrecard is NOT advertising. For that we have other medium. The main purpose for using Entrecard is to gain traffic, quality traffic. We don't need a socio-economic network of blogs Graham. If we need Alexa ranking (as promised on the Entrecard site) we would go commenting honestly on other blogs. Getting the backlinks from those comments would also help increase the PR, which in turn means more visibility and more traffic. The reason we used Entrecard was because we could do this commenting without having to write anything. Moreover, we could search, look into sites and advertise only on the top sites so that, once again, we could get genuine quality traffic.

But the moment you know that you can do this quickly you can also be rest assured that there goes your quality traffic. People would land up on your site, drop the card and leave. What's the point in using Entrecard in that case. Moreover, I followed up with the Entrecard blog on their site and found out some more interesting facts about the Entrecard toolbar. The toolbar only works with Firefox 3. This will not work with other web browsers. The toolbar is still in it's beta, and bugs have already started to show their ugly heads. People are unable to login using their Entrecard toolbar even when it's installed on Firefox 3. Moreover, imagine 10 JavaScript enabled sites opening up on your computer all at the same time. That's ridiculous! That would make some of the best configurations crawl on it's knees!

I honestly don't find a good reason why would we use Entrecard anymore! The management team at Entrecard should understand, we bloggers are pretty serious when it comes to quality traffic. And Entrecard definitely does not qualify as a bling. If we needed to bodypaint our blog, we would have used something like Blogsticker, that even looks good.

So until and unless these people come up with a good strategy, I think I'll let it pass.