BYTE MARKS
Friendster, Ryze sites build your social circle
By Burt Lum
If there is anything alive and kicking in the Internet sector, it's got to be social networking. Venture capitalists are even interested in this stuff again.
These sites are online social clubs. Several years ago, before the Internet bubble burst, Classmates.com and Match.com were hot. Now, evidently, the venture guys are loosening their grip on their money and investing in companies such as Ryze.com and Friendster.com.
I still get a kick out of both Ryze and Friendster, but for different reasons.
Ryze makes it easy to meet people under the guise of business networking. I've never had any real business result from Ryze, but it is fun to interact with people, especially through the site's guestbook and bulletin boards. Although the Ryze site is feature-rich, I've heard people complain of the text-oriented user interface. It can get monotonous after a while.
Friendster leans more toward the purely social side. The site boasts more than half a million users after six months of operation. Friendster has a dark side, though. True identities are not a requirement on Friendster, thus giving birth to the fakester. Quite a bit of press has been given to this phenomenon. Fakesters got so prevalent on Friendster that CEO Jonathan Abrams has made an effort to remove them all from the system. Do a Google search on fakester and read all about it.
Now there's another site out of this same genre, called Tribe.net.
A couple of friends of mine who are pros at social networking turned me on to it.
When asked why he likes Tribe.net, Randy Delucchi writes back, "Compared to the Friendster phenomenon, Tribe feels a lot more 'real' (fewer fakesters), a lot more focused on real interaction (vs. high-tech 'yearbook signing' and friend-collecting on Friendster). Tribe also sports a deeper, richer, more well-designed user interface than Ryze."
So with that said, I've been hanging out on Tribe to see what pops in. Building a network there is slower than on Ryze, but the interaction is real and much less a numbers game.
Reach Burt Lum at www.brouhaha.net.
