Apart from the obvious – it’s not open source – I have to say the user experience for creating groups and signing up is very slick and polished – they have put alot of effort into usability and making it easy.
Not saying Shapado is in any way lacking, but the administration and group creation process is still, well… “Developery” it works fine but currently lacks the polish qHub – I guess this is just a matter of time but ultimately the easier and slicker it becomes, the more likely people will create groups
Interestingly, when you have created a group, they have several “widgets” – which for them means bits of script you can paste into other websites to make integration easier – this is of course essential to Shapado as well moving forward. In Shapado widgets currently means “stuff that goes at the side of question pages” which I would suggest we rename to “page features” or something – reserving “widgets” for script includes ( eg. Question Box, Latest Questions etc )
Although quite customisable, qhub’s widgets do have a slight developery feel about them – it’s not as slick as the signup, but as we know functionality should come first – you can always change the paint later
I definitely like some of the layout ideas – I think finding the middle ground, somewhere between qhub and stack exchange is about where shapado should sit – but hey thats just my opinino
My test site is here: http://think.qhub.com/
