SlideShare: How easy to share your slides?
I wasn't sure why someone want to share their slides online with public. I never had to, so far. Last week, I gave a training online and I couldn't send handouts to all the audience as they are almost from every corner of the world. So, I want to share my presentation slides online with selective audience from my last week's training.
One of my friends mentioned Slideshare could do. So I signed up, only to decide after a couple of minutes that Slideshare is not for me.
If you want to share your presentation selectively, SlideShare is a no-go.
If you want to just open your presentation to general public its not an issue. But if you want to selectively share your presentation with a few of your buddies privately, Slideshare is a no go. If you want to share a presentation with your friend, it requires that your friend is also a member of Slideshare. So if you want to share, you must ask your friend to signup with Slideshare and send you an email with his user id. One more web application. One more password to manage. Too much hassle.
Account Confirmation Confusion
No matter how many times I confirm, it still says, I must confirm. Either it doesn't work or the message is there by mistake.
Hello xxxx! Your account has been created
You must confirm your email address in order to use all SlideShare features. Look in your email inbox for the email we sent you (check bulk/spam folders if you can't find it).
Going back to Google Docs, so sweet.
All web applications talk about usability, but doesn't look like everybody understand. If you want to share a presentation with someone, why would you force that person to become a member of your web application? Isn't too much hassle?
I decided to go back to Google docs. The beauty of Google docs is that if you want to share any doc (document, spreadsheet or a presentation), you don't need your friend to signup for Google docs. All you need is just an email address. So sweet.
Update 2/4/2008: Amit from Slideshare commented that private sharing via a secret URL is already available on Slideshare.net. It appears that just I couldn't find it when I needed it. I logged in to Slideshare.net to use this feature to see how it works, I see text everywhere on Slideshare.net that explains that I can do privately share the presentations, including this new Ad that popped up when I just refreshed it. The ad says it all.
One secret URL may not help me much as I won't be able to track who really is reviewing it, and if somebody publish that URL on their blog, it won't be secret anymore. But, the next option is something that will work for me for now, "embed on password protected websites and intranet sites". That would give me all the protection I am looking for and give me information on who is viewing and who is not. At this point I couldn't figure out a way to get code to embed a private slide share presentation. I will post it once I figure out.
Comments
Came to your blog via technorati.
I'm from slideshare and I appreciate your candid feedback via the blogpost. The account confirmation confusion is still being ironed out...we deployed some new code to our servers last week and the confusion is part of the teething problems there. Should be fine by the next cycle.
About private sharing, it is possible to share privately without getting people to sign up; we have something called a 'secret URL' for every private slideshow that you can send to anybody via email, IM for non-public viewing. No signups needed...just email it and it is viewable to others who have the URL (irrespective of whether they are on slideshare or otherwise).. We probably need to do a better job of exposing that function...
If you need any specific help, please email me.
Thanks for using slideshare.
rgds
amit