Good afternoon, everyone. If you're aware of the new blockchain dapps coming out, perhaps you'll have heard of Murmur, an EOS-based twitter-like microblogging platform made to put social media onto the blockchain.
The Murmur team released their web app today, and as promised I will review some aspects of the platform so that you can decide if it's worth shifting over and if it is the new standard in blockchain social media.
The Murmur layout is very simple to grasp, easy to use and navigate.
Posting is simple, and interactions with others is nice and organic. Literally no surprises here, which is nice -- except you'll have to get used to the terms for actions: Snoops are likes, Yells are Shares, Decibels are like the STEEM you get for performing actions on Steemit. It's easy to move from Twitter to Murmur for posts; I've been posting on both for days and I gladly get more attention on Murmur, even with 870x less followers :]
Some problems I've had were updating my profile information. I had to retry uploading a picture over 6 times before it actually showed. This was paired with by bio and display name, which still haven't uploaded. I'm actually afraid of retrying because my image could get erased and I'd have to start all over.
So here's where we'll run into our first set of problems. Yeah, the MUR token can be used for rewards, and the staff has been throwing giveaways on the platform for a while. But the brutal truth of any cryptocurrency platform is that the token needs to have value within the platform. You can convert MUR to EOS (and then EOS to BTC) through the decentralized exchanges advertised on the front page, but unless there are people looking to buy MUR tokens, they won't have any fundamental value!
Take STEEM, for example. In order to have value, you can buy STEEM to power up your account, which grants you more resource usage on the platform as well as a higher voting power. You can convert STEEM to SBD and pay to boost your posts via vote bots. You can trade STEEM on the well-known exchanges like Bittrex or Binance, and there are a multitude of platforms that use STEEM: DTube, DSound, DYaddayadda. This creates a lot of demand for those wanting to rise to power through Steemit.
However for MUR, you can get all of these rewards (of which I haven't even got decibels yet despite being supposed to), but you can't use any MUR at this time to boost posts, nor influence your voting power, nor use the token in any sort of economical sense beyond trading out into EOS. This means that there will only be sellers.
I surely hope the developers address this.
...is very clean, and very glitchy. You need a web extension called Scatter to use it, which asks you for your private keys -- sketchy!
The web platform itself though looks very functional, however I couldn't make a post through it. There's a dialog once you send a post that comes up to confirm the transaction, and it looks very confusing at first. However you press accept to send your post, and then you get a "Something went wrong" error... okay.
Also, you can't view anyone's profile yet. The overall look is kinda polished but there are some weak spots. The "Who to follow" goes all the way down until everyone on the platform is listed -- not tailored in any way to me. The coloring of the left sidebar had me confused which type of decibels I was viewing. The alignment is a little off.
The "About Us" page when logged out doesn't exist. Uploading a photo, closing the dialog then reopening it disables my ability to hit submit. You cannot search posts, only users. All of the links are dead except the "Log out" under my account name. On mobile, you can't deposit from the wallet, nor can you withdraw. The "View Account Information" button on mobile shows all of your public and private keys without a warning.
Overall I think both the mobile app and web app were designed well, but whoever developed the back-end needs to get hit in the head with a screwdriver. That and the economic model seriously needs work. I know that people are excited to have their first EOS-based social media platform, but it's critical that your MUR token has a real use outside of just converting into another coin.
The decibel system is explained well on the site, but once again I haven't seen any decibels put into my account even after getting likes and liking posts. Furthermore, it seems to be so that the decibels are manually converted once a month into MUR -- shouldn't this be automated? And a month is a very long time to wait for rewards, in my opinion.
I looked at the Mur development team before their site design and it seemed as if it were two aspiring entrepreneurs and all of the developers were outsourced to some Indian company. There's nothing against Indian companies, but again whoever designed the backend and the token model needs to get hit in the head with a screwdriver. (Can I legally say this?)
And as for Murmur, cool hype, nice community but not very useful. I want to see it succeed, though, which is why I made this review to point out all of the things that I feel need to be taken care of. Last thing I want to see in cryptos is another inferior app and exit scam.
Dapp review: 2/5
