What I Wear

 

New Fashion Sharing Site

I’ve just received an invitation to sign up for a new fashion sharing site What I Wear. Let’s take a look!

Old Ladies Not Welcome

OMG! On the profile thingy you set your birthdate, mine is 25 April 1969. I’m 44. But apparently you aren’t allowed to be over 43! The earliest year it will let me use for a birth year is 1970!? Gawd. Women over 40 have no fashion!?

Crappy UI/UX

After signing up I tried to upload a profile pix. It’s weird that they take all your bio info from Facebook, and then don’t take your profile pix. So I tried to upload one. Even though I see peeps with profile pix, I couldn’t upload one. I tried 8 browsers:
• Chrome (SRWare Iron) – upload & crop ok, but “Save” doesn’t work
• Firefox – upload & crop ok, but “Save” doesn’t work
• IE – uploads, but stretched out, and “Save” button doesn’t work
• Safari – won’t even upload a photo
• Chrome (Rockmelt) – won’t even upload a photo
• Maxthon – upload & crop ok, but “Save” doesn’t work
• Lunascape6 – like IE it uploads distorted and won’t “Save”
• Sleipnir – uploads and crops but won’t “Save”
I restarted the browsers, cleared my cache, restarted the Win7 machine, and still couldn’t upload a profile pix. So on a fashion website: no fashion headshot for me. On the “Cover Photo” I was able to get it to successfully upload once. But then I tried to change photos and couldn’t get anything to upload at all.

Cool Looks Uploader!

Uploading my look was a lot of fun and did work easily from my browser of choice: Chrome / SRWare Iron. They like pix at least 960 x 960 pixels. Even though my favorite designers, like my LeeZu! blouse, Agnes Sharple camisole, Ibizarre Leggings, and Maitreya Gold shoes, weren’t on their designer list, it was easy to add any “unknown” designers.

Widgets!

And OMG, their widget! So cool! Who doesn’t live for cool widgets to embed in ‘yer blawg!!! 😀 They have 3 exciting widgets for you: Profile Badge, Looks Badge & Wow Badge!

Sadly, their “Profile Badge” uses a condensed font for my name in the preview on their website, but doesn’t seem to be able to generate condensed that on our WordPress / Woo Currents site. So if your view is the same as mine, I’m “Vanessa Blayl…” I could never get the Looks Badge to embed at all. I did get the Wow Badge to work at one point, but putting more than 1 badge on a page seemed to mess it up. Now I can’t get the Wow Badge to work at all, even on a fresh post. The code for both is nearly identical. Weird. Profile Badge works. Wow Badge doesn’t. Oh well, the “Vanessa Blayl…” profile badge is nice.

Well, it was. Till I put a single pix on this page. Then even the Profile Badge disappeared. I guess it’s cool since they probably intend for you to put the widget in a silo’d sidebar. But lots of other widgets, Eventbrite, Memo Lane, etc, all embed just fine. Oh well. Screen shots.

Speed

When you’re uploading a look you’re spending time tagging and typing and that’s mostly on you. When you click on any of their “pages” the site does seem to run pretty slow. Perhaps over time funding will allow them to get faster servers or optimize their code.

CrunchBase

Although their Facebook page says that What I Wear launched on 11 Nov 2011, WIW isn’t in CrunchBase. Their Pinterest lists no people or participants and lists their location as “The Globe.” They have however managed to post 877 pins. The WIW website is also void of information. Their legal page never refers to any entity or person or location other than What I Wear. The only contact of any kind is the sole email address “copyright@whatiwear.com” if you want to file a DMCA takedown notice. Not sure why I have to provide contact info when I send out a MailChimp email, yet the email I received from WIW has none. I’ve just submitted WIW to CrunchBase. I didn’t have a lot of info, but I posted what I had which might be live in several days. When I tried to find What I Wear in CrunchBase they offered “Who What Wear.” I’ve embedded the CrunchBase widget for Who What Wear here, just to note that some widgets do embed just fine on a page.

Pessimist

Hate to be a pessimist. But. If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that if you take the time to craft and post your content on For-Profit, Proprietary platforms, you’re gonna get screwed. How?
• Avatars Not Welcome Here (Model Mayhem)
• We got bought. Shutting down service. (Memo Lane)
• We got bought. New focus. Don’t need you anymore. (Looklet)
• We didn’t get bought. We give up. (Posterous)
The list goes on.

Optimist

What I Wear is really cool and fun to play with! Let’s party like it’s 1999!

What I Wear!

CONCLUSION: In spite of the realistic pessimism, it is a fun site. I’d love it if avatars from many worlds would post their looks here. It’d be interesting to see if we could build a small community within this community. Also to see if we could interact with the fleshvatars. It’s ironic that cyberspace, like physical space, tends toward homophily, when it seems like all the good in this world comes from diversity.

L i n k y . L i n k y

• What I Wear / Vanessa Blaylock
• What I Wear / Twitter