Blah, blah, blah, Social Networking, blah, blah, blah
For something that began with so much promise, I’m pretty much sick of social networking at this point.
Or to be more precise, I’m sick of new social networking startups.
Take this one, for example:
Park City, Utah-based Uspot opened its
doors today, claiming to be the social-networking sweet spot for college
students using a .edu e-mail address. Todd Cohen, president of Uspot, believes
his site will be the one place where students can satisfy and share all of their
online social needs. The reason, he said, is media.“It’s all media,” Cohen told internetnews.com. “All this media is going
to be related to you, because it’s a group of your peers. And people don’t want
to have to log into five different sites. So we’re really giving students a way
to share their video, music and photos.”Of course, other social-networking sites offer music- and photo-sharing
capabilities. But Uspot, Cohen said, extends users’ capabilities with podcasts,
documents and blogs, as well as providing features within each media section
that give users ultimate control over their content.
Cripes! Who the f*ck cares if a site has X, Y, and Z? Sooner or later, your favorite site is going to be acquired by Microsoft or Yahoo!, who will simply add those same features.
And isn’t there already social networking for colleges? Hello, The Facebook?
I love the fact that Web 2.0 is enabling so many new startups, but please, make them *new* for goodness sakes.
I’m sick of even the new startups — even ones I use. I use diigo for most of my del.icio.us functionality, I love that product – but were I investing I wouldn’t put in a dime. I see two types of “good” startups
1. Those that encourage better functionality
2. Those that consolidate current functionality that is spread across numerous providers.
Number 2 is interesting, number 1 is revolutionary. Hopefully after most/all the copycats fail (in teen social networking they may and probably will not since most of those customers migrate by nature) we will see a consolidation of tools leading to a revolutionary set of ideas (i.e. The web2.0 startups we all love like del.icio.us).
Chris – is there any correlation here to software devolpment? Intermittent versions (1.2, 1.5, etc.) “Consolidate” tools by fixing bugs and streamlining code, and the comple versions introduce revolutionary new ideas? I’m probably way off on that as I’m quite ignorant on software devolpment.
Tyler,
Yes, in software there are typically point releases which provide incremental improvements, and massive upgrades which deliver major changes. My sense is that most of the stuff I’m seeing now from Web 2.0 is in the point release category, and it’s hard to get excited.