Stop and Look at GO December 14, 1998 I understand that GO Network was just launched and is still in beta, so I'm just going to take a look at the site and point out a few things that I saw. I'll also forward the URL of this story to GO so they can read over the feedback. GO Network is just another portal and it fits into the pack of sites that spits out sports scores, news and weather forecasts. It's an interesting first iteration considering it's the joint production of Infoseek, Starwave and Disney. I'll be waiting to see GO a few months from now and how they target the site besides Netcenter, Excite, MSN and Yahoo. Weather I first took a look at how the weather section of GO Network was implemented. Specifically, I wanted to know what type of system was available to select a city. For example, My Yahoo uses a series of geographic areas as the first step then provides a list of cities for you to add to your weather section. But with GO they use a simple search box that uses a city name or a ZIP code to select a city. However, with the example search being "Example: Chicago, IL or 60622" I found it confusing. I tried a search for Vancouver, BC and received a message saying that it wasn't in the database. But entering Vancouver alone provided a list of two cities that matched and Vancouver Canada was listed. One inconsistency in the weather help is the reference to buttons. It mentions the "Continue" button when the only buttons during personalising weather is "Get weather" or "Cancel". It might be wise for GO to also include ALT tags on the graphics in the weather section. Sports With JavaScript and other tools to work with data on a local machine, it means less back and forth traffic to the server after each operation. Example, on GO I can add or remove teams that I want to track on my front page without having to tell the server until I'm finished. But on My Yahoo, if I want to add a team and see the refreshed display then I'll have to tell the server and it has to reload the entire page to see which choices are still available and which choices I've selected. The help section for personalising sports has an odd note in that it points out that: "You may track up to 150 teams." Is this an arbitrary number? In any case, unless someone chooses 150 teams I doubt it's a problem that a user needs to know. Horoscope On the front page there's a horoscope section that can set with your date of birth or a list of the different signs for you to choose. If you enter an invalid date in the lookup that uses your date of birth then your provided with an odd looking list of signs and the dates that they cover. They squish the dates into a tiny column so the months with longer names wrap and create a mess out of a simple list. When you set your sign then it automatically retrieves today's horoscope and places it on the front page. While there is only room for the beginning of the horoscope they might consider a better system than stopping in the middle of a word (it stops exactly after 105 characters). New Membership Possibly a product of Disney lawyers, GO Network has three different registration routes: for adults, teens and kids. The difference at this point seems to have GO Network offers (to receive GO Network news and be listed in the Member directory) only offered to people who select adult or teen. Along with kids being required to include an e-mail address to their parent.

Related links [1] With Go Network, Disney Steps Into the Portal Wars; Saul Hansell on New York Times [2] Disney and Infoseek raise the curtain on Go; Jim Hu on News.Com