Silicon Slopes: A tech community site from Omniture
Tue, February 5, 2008 at 5:03 PM 
It was an instant love-hate relationship.
I give Omniture high marks for intent. Silicon Slopes looks to create a community site and resource for Utahs high tech companies. (Silicon Slopes lists that number at 3500 which seems astronomically high to me but what do I know?) Omnitures taking the lead with this site in not only promoting the site to build a tech community (and position Omniture as leading the discussion) but promoting Utah, presumably with the intent of positioning Utah as a winter wonderland of technology to balance Silicon Valleys fog. High marks there as well.
But the execution is somewhat problematic. First, the site is so slow that I think that they must be running it on a Comodore 64. I mean it is PAINFUL. If I weren't really interested I would shoot the site in the head just to get if off of my foot. (It looks as if it's built on a wiki platform.)
There are some unexpected behaviors as well. It seems that you can just create and edit a company without even logging in. I created Sendside's profile easily enough but it surprised me when I updated the logo with a message telling me that it would have to approve before going live. Either the creation landed just as the admin was looking to OK new pages, or the logics odd. As a secondary bonus it seems that someone added Vspring as an investor in Sendside.... not only has Vspring not invested, but there's no way to edit or delete that information. (Someone's messing with our cap table.)
Something's amiss. I'm a fan of Omniture and I'd like to be a fan of Silicon Slopes. I'll give it a week.
Jeff Barson
SInce I posted this yesterday, Mark Adams, Director of Community Development for Omniture called me. Evidently, Silicon Slopes is a newer venture that I thought and they're going through some birthing pains which I fully understand.
After speaking to Mark for a while I've revised my previous estimate. I'll give the site a month.
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