All quiet on the Yuku front. In fact it’s very quiet; quiet enough to have started the rumour mill concerning ezboard’s CEO Robert Labatt. His last CEO Blog update was on 28 April 2006. Likewise his blog update on Yuku. If you care to take a look at his wonderfully-named Yuku profile page at http://rob.u.yuku.com you’ll see he was “last seen” on 9 May 2006.

As I mentioned in my earlier post over two months has passed since Labatt wrote that ezboards would be helped to migrate over to Yuku. But in their usual fiddling/Rome burning way, all they’ve really done is messed about with user profiles by the looks of things. Speed - or a chronic lack of it - is still a very real issue. No sign yet of formal pricing either for non-advertisement Gold status or for the newly announced ezSupporter version of Yuku (mind you, they’ve announced it but appear not to have any concrete ideas on implementation: “…more information as we figure things out over the coming weeks”. More accurate timescale forecasting then, eh Rob?

And of even more note is the complete silence on how they plan to share advertising revenue with Yuku board owners. The USP of Yuku and why they claimed Yuku was “better than free”.

The hardcore ezApologists meanwhile are all still talking Yuku up, saying it’s still in beta but is going to be great when it’s finished. I’m thinking of building a spacecraft of my own which will not need fuel to power it. It’s still just a doodle on a notepad, but hey! It’ll be great when it’s finished…

Mind you, given ezboard hasn’t managed to implement any advertising on Yuku to gain revenue, I suppose the users can be forgiven for getting something for nothing. Those who’ve bravely sought to try out board customisation on Yuku in preparation for The Great ezBoard Migration are finding out that whilst the Yuku developers are making code changes, it’s probably a waste of their time as the object classes change names thereby making CSS changes pointless.

I wonder if Labatt will still be speaking as a “Communities Expert” at a dinner at Maya in San Francisco on 24 May? Might be worthwhile showing up to hear him speak and ask him some questions…