Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Published on April 16, 2008 By Draginol In Virtual Communities

ImpulseDriven.net is an alternative virtual community site much like JoeUser.com. There is a lot of overlap between the two in terms of content but ImpulseDriven has more game and software categories and excludes the political and religious categories.

The two have considerably different UIs as well.

So which UI do you prefer?

a) JoeUser.com

or

ImpulseDriven.net


Comments
on Apr 16, 2008
Shouldn't you be coding AI?  

Impulsedriven seems cleaner.  I like that.
But JoeUser has a deel like there are more people involved.  That has value too.

I, however, vote for the cleaner interface.  Go Team Impulse!
on Apr 16, 2008
ImpulseDriven.net gets my vote just because it doesn't have policital and religious categories.   

If that's what I was looking for then I would be on sites that provided that outlet.
on Apr 16, 2008

I much prefer the color-scheme for ImpulseDriven over JoeUser. Quite honestly, though, the interfaces are almost identical (it's just the brown vs. grey thing). They seem to look and operate the exact same (in my limited usage).

I do wish at least that the "Life Journals" category were represented on ImpulseDriven. I can understand the Religious and Political categories being dropped, but the Life Journals, to me at least, are sort of the core of blogging in general.

Still, I like ImpulseDriven, and I like that it can be so easily and cleanly accessed from within Impulse (yeah, I get it).

on Apr 17, 2008

ImpulseDriven gets my wholehearted vote. I love the UI and the focus on game/software stuff.

Kudos to andrew_ for his excellent work on this.

on Apr 17, 2008
Impulsedriven.net here
on Apr 17, 2008
I'll stick with the Wincustomize forums but if I had to choose between those two I'd go with Impulsedriven
on Apr 17, 2008

A

I think I like the JU Ui better.  I don't mind the color.  Brown is nice.  The JU seems a bit lighter.  

Also, Life Blogging is my favorite category so I miss it in the impulsedriven.net.  This color scheme is nice too.  Love green.

on Apr 17, 2008
Ok now that I've opened Impulse again I'm almost tempted to use the forums through here now just for the dark background instead of all that white.

But then you scroll to the bottom of that dark page and the white Add A Reply box just about blinds you      
on Apr 17, 2008
I say Impulse (green over brown) but the darkness of the Impulse color scheme is a bit hard on the eyes.
on Apr 17, 2008

I do prefer the UI of ImpulseDriven better.  I was there yesterday and thought to myself, "Man, why couldn't JU2 look more like this?"


But the points about content are true.  I'll probably still spend most of my time at JU, even though most of my posts will cross-pollize to ImpulseDriven.

on Apr 17, 2008

Hey, why can't the categories of ID being customizable, like the categories of skins at WC?

I'd much rather do my blogging and reading from within Impulse (it's prettier and seems much more stable, even in beta, than IE8, Firefox, or Safari). Have the current categories be the defeault, but allow users to go into preferences and add Politics or Religion or Like Journals or whatever if they'd like. That would be much more in line with the "customization" theme, and allow users hwo would like to to utilize Impulse as a one-stop-shop for all things community-related...

on Apr 17, 2008

The Impulse UI is fantastic.  Very clean and easy to manage.

on Apr 17, 2008

Even though I spent many months working with Andrew on JoeUser, I absolutely think that ImpulseDriven is the far better design & layout.  I guess we could think of it as JoeUser being v1, with ImpulseDriven being v2.

on Apr 18, 2008

ID.net by a country mile.

on Apr 18, 2008

Design wise, ID all the way. The new JU color scheme kinda bugs me, too drab.  (I say while giving high props to the overall design and technical achievement.)

Nothing wrong with two communities if they are focused on different communities and groups.  And with JU (and now ID) you have the opportunity to intelligently cross syndicate content where appropriate.

One thing that bugs me about both site designs is the absence of a left side gutter/margin of any sort.  Even a half inch would go a long way to providing some eye pleasing framing.

I just checked, and the gutter is missing when the sites are read inside RSS Bandit, but is there when viewed in the standalone IE6.