Washingtonpost.com Sports Mobile: You Suck

(another bitch session by dinoterp)

I'm on my blackberry about 20 of the 24 available hours of the day. I have a top 5-6 sites that I hit on a regular basis and one of those is Sports section of the Washington Post mobile site (for reference: http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/item.jsp?key=sp). Although I appreciate being able to read some local articles on my phone, I'm going to call them out on the things about the site that suck in the hopes that somebody from the staff accidentally types the wrong URL for a legitimate site and ends up here. Also - don't confuse this blog with a referendum on the Post or the regular version of washingtonpost.com... I've got more and different gripes with those to be explored in later blogs. Let's start our spiral into bitching and complaining about the mobile site.

First of all, the content is updated about as frequently as the Skins make a smart front office move (bah dum ching!). Things are usually updated in the morning and maybe an article or two once during the day if something groundbreaking happens, and even then it's way after all of the major news outlets have thrown 400 writers on it. Worse, there's a bunch of content that's relatively static. There's been an article titled "Horton Working to Build on Rookie Season" in the Redskins section for about 5 weeks. I didn't want to read some crappy introspective piece on Horton then and I still don't want to read it now.

Second, there's no way to figure out who wrote the article before clicking on them. The only few sections where you can figure it out from the main page are Steinberg and any of the Insiders.  Can't I get a simple "Boswell: " intro on the headline? There's articles I only happen to click on, only to find that Wilbon is the writer and it's a genius column. Seems to me like that should be a selling point for that article, right? And this weekend we had a filly win the Preakness for the first time in 85 years, which was not only a juicy national storyline, but a LOCAL storyline... yet logging on to the mobile site on Sunday morning, I couldn't find a Beyer column. Seriously? Shouldn't his column be the ONLY thing on the site?

Next, every decent article is broken up into multiple pages. I understand the Post makes some money off of this, but for those who have experienced the mobile web, it is slow and sometimes spotty. Clicking on a headline with minimal guarantee of a good article, then having to click to the next pages or "read full article" is frustrating as hell. I know I read less articles because of this, which can't be what they are hoping for. I'm also now a metro rider and I've got a long haul trip. Verizon works on the metro, but the web is shaky and I don't have the luxury of clicking a thousand links and waiting for them to successfully load.

Finally, there's the text alerts.  Let me start by saying that in theory, this is a great service and there is some good information that comes from it.  But two things leave me scratching my head constantly.  The first is that they always make it seem like they have some scoop on the site.  But as stated in the first complaint above, the content is never updated.  The second is one that gets consistently mocked by me and my friends - the in-game and post game scoring alerts during Redskins season.  At halftime, I always get a text saying something like "Halftime.  Redskins losing to the Eagles 14-10".  Really?  No shit?  Wow, I can't wait until I get the next text at the end of the game letting me know the final score!  Are they fucking serious?  What Skins fan is going through the trouble to get real time text alerts on any Skins related sent to their phone... and isn't watching the game to know the score?  It's ridiculous.  I also can't tell you how many times I've suffered through a heart wrenching loss, only to get a text 10 minutes later that reminds me of the final score.  Thanks a ton.

Anyway, to wrap things up, I guess I can't complain since I pound that piece of shit site like 14 times a day.  Just seems like some easy improvements would make the whole thing a thousand times better and more useful.