In bed with Taptu Mobile Search Beta

Rating: My mobile search nurse?

So. I am not feeling too great. I am getting a cold and feel terrible and on top of that I have one million and one other things to do.

But one of them is to give the new Taptu Mobile Search BETA a once over. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to publish the URL – but the launch is two weeks away. So I will do a bigger, better and stronger analysis then.

But on the face of it the new search is looking a lot better than the Alpha version I slated a while ago. I am glad I saw that though as I now feel quite fond of the search having followed its growth.

But first the bad.
Even though the mobile search is better than the Alpha it is still in BETA and featured services such as the sharing solution are not yet available. Moreover, at one point after following on from a single search I ended up in a Google controlled page with its own spider web that didn’t want me to get back to Taptu search easily.

On top of that the lists of different option is slightly long for my likely and I am becoming a fan of page by page navigation instead of constant scrolling. But this really does depend on the device and my user experience is likely to have been much better if I was using a phone with a scroll rather than a click down option.

So that was the bad. Now the good.
The improvement is clear.
The search fresh.
The content strong and since using Taptu I have no joined two additional MySpace groups – which I doubt I ever would have found and..
Take a deep breath – I will use it again.
I am not hooked as yet – but I like the simplicity the colours, the ease and (I hope) the cumbersome navigation will improve (fast).

What is missing?
This needs to be a client. Cookies are not enabled on phones and booking marking pages is fine but (if you do as many searches and tests as I do) you would want clients too. I think if this was a thin downloadable client search it would grow virally. The difficulty Taptu has now is marketing.

The service is getting there but getting users to test it and use it will be the tough bit. I see some kind of cross marketing with Blyk here with its University Fresher bag move …

I know marketing is tough as GoMo News is a successful business to business blog. But as we raise funds to launch our consumer GoMo community the costs suddenly rocket.

Anyway – more after the official Taptu launch….