co-browsing: why use software that you can’t use and patrons don’t like?

The Librarian in Black has a few more things to say about co-browsing in her post How much is co-browsing really helping our users?

I stopped trying to use co-browsing a long time ago. It’s bad customer service to give something to someone that has a good chance of not working. Period. Everyone touts co-browsing as the cat’s pajamas, and it is kind of cool A) when it actually works, which is rare and B) when the user’s question actually warrants it…. I am not a co-browsing fan. At all. If the big-name software companies can get to work on a Mac with a firewall and a dial-up connection running Firefox, then rock on. I’ll be a fan.

Consumer/librarian reviews

My favorite thing about blogs beyond the personal interactions that they afford is reading what people think about more products than I can usefully evaluate on my own. Two reviews that came through my reader lately have been true gems:

1. Mary “LibraryLaw” Minow discusses LibraryElf: My library elf – the joy and the horror
2. Sarah “Librarian in Black” Houghton tries a beta of QuestionPoint’s Flash interface: New QuestionPoint Flash Interface: LiB’s Review

Meredith “Information Wants to be Free” Farkas also does a lot of good no-nonsense reviews.