As I sit here going through our Triond mail, I’m deleting about the thousandth request for us to join Bukisa and shaking my head as I do it.

I want to say this all started a few weeks ago when everyone decided to rally around a fellow Trionder in a boycott to show support for the cause. Which of course we did, because part of being part of the Triond community is building friendships. So for a week, we watched our feeble progress and thought about article ideas for the week to come. And this was no problem at all, for a strong sense of loyalty courses through the both of us.

Toward the end of what felt like an extremely long week, we were turned on to Bukisa. And I must admit, at the time it really did seem like the ticket. One of our articles got over 150 clicks in the first several hours. We were amazed. So we put up more and more articles and as we did this, we were never able to replicate the same success as that first article. And now we’ve created new problems for ourselves. Which leads me to my first point here:

Bukisa is NOT user friendly

That’s right. When I log on to Triond all I have to do is click on the Content button and I can easily see all of stats without ever having to click on the actual article if I don’t want to. And there it is, all in a glance. No fuss, no hassle. Then I log on to Bukisa, where it opens up to some generic page where I am forced to navigate through several pages just to get through to where our articles are. And then, to make matters worse I have to go through every single article individually to check the status of them. This does not make me happy.

Word count matters….but quality does not

Apparently Bukisa has some type of stipulation about word count, so several of our articles cannot even be published there. I read this unfortunate poem not long ago that someone felt the need to write about a flower. It was the same four lines over and over again. Agonizing, but for this obviously very simple person, the only way for them to inflict their creativity upon poor unsuspecting readers was through repetition. Thank you Bukisa, I have now wasted another minute or two of my life simply recanting the experience of reading that dreadful poem.

Back to the user friendly point…..

Every time I am so silly as to try to click on the “Need Help” or “More Information”, I am met with the same result…..the computer crashes. Every time.

Who’s actually reading the articles on Bukisa?

Each time we put an article on Bukisa we refresh the page a few seconds after it has been published and it immediately has three or four hits. So, is there really people sitting there just waiting for things to be published so they can read it first? I could be wrong, but that seems a bit preposterous. So is Bukisa giving us free clicks? And if so….why? It’s not like it makes that much of a difference.

I guess the bottom line is this; it’s time to evaluate why we’re all here. We got into Triond as the very first step into our freelance writing career. We knew then that this was not going to pay our rent, or fund our next car, or put our son through college. It was purely getting our feet wet and getting in the writing habit again. This month we have made more money on Triond than Bukisa, it can be measured in cents rather than dollars, but that’s beside the point I suppose. Triond has become our social network and we’re happy here, even if we’re not getting rich because of it. There are too many other things to be done these days without having to build a whole new social network on a poorly put together site that might make us another .13 cents this month. If it’s big money you’re looking for you won’t find it on Triond or Bukisa. There are special websites, which are highly professional and have special requirements for those of us who choose to make a living at this type of thing. Keep it in perspective that Triond and Bukisa are essentially about the community and networking, that’s about it.

So if you’re wondering if we might want to join you on Bukisa, please just simply wonder about it alone for awhile and spare us having to delete the email. We’ll see you all around here on Triond.