There's a nice little rant over on BoingBoing:
Is there a word for that post-Friendster/Tribe/LinkedIn/SixDegrees oh-god-not-again feeling I'm getting as I read the launch announcement? Like, HTML rug burn? I mean, really -- I haven't played around with eurekster yet, and I mean no disrespect to whoever built the project. But if one more website asks me to "invite all of my friends," I swear I'm gonna fucking throw up. Invite your own damn friends, you website.
Heh.
I guess it's a big copycat game right now.
Posted by jzawodn at January 22, 2004 11:35 AM
Oh yes it's a copycat game. A nice indicator is that the Samwer brothers in Germany have now founded myfriends.de, which is pretty similar to friendster, just look at the design.
Why is this so important. The Samwer brothers came to fame in Germany when they founded Alando (I think it was called) as a copy of eBay in the US and then sold it to eBay something like 6 months later for a big pile of cash. Born was eBay Germany. :)
I presume they are already on the phone with the friendster people ;)
Oliver
Oliver, I think that is like alot of tech companies.. instead of fighting for the top in what ever sector they just rip of the idea and then grap a portion of the market or create some feature that is popular and then sell the ideas / tech back to the mother ship..
it's pretty sad..
- justin
Some things that I find interesting:
- Friendster may have first-mover advantage, but of all the social networking sites I've checked out, it's the slowest, the most feature-poor, the most trendy-but-obnoxious, and overall, just the most plain user-unfriendly.
- There haven't been that many niches yet, which surprises me. There's either "social networking" or "business networking" or "a mushy combo of both"... but no, say, "Geek Social Networking" (oh wait, that'd include too many people) or "Artist Social Networking" and so on.
- These networks seem to be hugely popular on the coasts, but many of my (otherwise in-the-know) friends who live in the Midwest either haven't heard of Friendster or just learned of it recently. Then again, these are some of the same folks who have no only never heard of a blog, but cannot grok why blogs may be useful/cool/etc. Oh well.
I think that Eurekster is worth checking out. It has some utility for something we all do everyday: search.
So far, I am very pleased. I am looking for specific people to join my eurekster network, not necessarily my friends, but people that I share common professional interests with: web development, event promotion, online advertising, email marketing, experiential marketing.
I've started a blog to help make this happen.
http://eureksterblog.blogspot.com
