Wallop gets a makeover with a much better interface

I'm still buried in email and I've been spending most of the morning coding, so hopefully I'll be able to catch up tonight and tomorrow before the weekend. But yesterday I took a quick trip to the Wallop offices to talk with Karl Jacob, the CEO and get a tour of a new interface that Wallop is planning to push to production today.

I've covered Wallop a lot in the past, and I'm still a fan of the company. There have been signs of trouble with the departure of the CEO, but after talking to Karl and seeing the new version, I think it's clear they're moving forward and not backwards. They have totally redone the UI so that it is much easier to use and added features that bring it in line with a lot of other social networks while still keeping the creativity and "Flashyness" that help it stand out.

Click the picture to check out my Wallop page without having to log in

The biggest change is that the "blob" in the center of the screen has been replaced with a menu. You can quickly switch between photos, music and the other parts of the site in a way that makes more sense than the tiny icons from before. Friends now have a much greater role. All of your friends show up in a bar on the left side of the page and you can rank them as well as drag your top friends to a section that shows on your front page. You can see which friends are online and quickly chat with them. The "network" concept is mostly gone and I think this is a good change. In keeping with the real time social aspect of Wallop, the bottom of the page shows a taskbar for "Buzz" which shows music, photos, blogs or comments your friends have added. It's much more subtle than the current "What's new" panel and I think it's a good change.

They've gone to great lengths to keep the fun of Wallop while making some major changes that will make it easier for users to find what they're looking for and contribute content. According to Karl, transactions on the site are still growing and I know they're looking at converting the application to Flex and ActionScript 3 which would give them better performance and also might make it easier to develop mods. I'm excited to see the changes go live because I think they make Wallop a better application. If you don't have a Wallop account, the beta program is ending soon, but I can send you some if you drop me an email.