As a corollary to my previous post about WetPaint, I had a meeting with these guys earlier this week about possible employment.
I mentioned some of my previously mentioned concerns that this is more an evolutionary play than a revolutionary one.
Their pitch was that the "wiki" aspect of their free websites--allowing others to edit or add pages on your website--is the secret sauce that differentiates them from other social networking sites that offer websites (read: MySpace). I'm still skeptical.
The real value of something like this is to build out the content and information "tail" and become an interactive version of Wikipedia, but with a greater toward hobbies than factual information. However, most of the WetPaint sites I've perused have precious little information and member participation. Maybe it's too early to count them out yet, but I'm still skeptical.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Friday, February 2, 2007
WetPaint
Anybody been to WetPaint? These guys have an interesting variation on the social networking phenomena. WetPaint allows you to quickly and easily set up a web site around a particular interest. For example, I set up a website in about 2 minutes around vintage baseball cards. The website is free, but of course you have to tolerate lots of Google Ads down the left rail (not sure if WetPaint shares any of the revenue with the site owner). I can also easily invite others to my site where they can interact with me (and the posted content). Furthermore, there's a setting that allows users to even edit my site's pages!
This approach seems to be an evolution of the once-beloved Geocities business model. The difference, of course, being that we've realized storage is a cheap commodity that can be given away for free since more money can be made by serving ads. Unlike previous sites, they have also made them very interactive and viral right out of the box.
WetPaint is much more evolutionary than revolutionary. The challenge I see with their offering is that member postings are difficult to find and are not sorted or ranked in any particular order. For example, if I wanted to find a WetPaint site whose discussion at some point revolved around the 1963 topps Pete Rose rookie baseball card and counterfeit attempts, you'd be hard pressed to ever find that level of specificity on WetPaint. They simply don't provide the search capability nor do they tag or allow users to rank postings to be able to find highest quality, most relevant content. Finally, their offering seems very similar to websites that MySpace allows you to build (for free). Other than allowing other users to edit your site, I don't see any difference.
To me, this is where many social network communities, including WetPaint fall short.
This approach seems to be an evolution of the once-beloved Geocities business model. The difference, of course, being that we've realized storage is a cheap commodity that can be given away for free since more money can be made by serving ads. Unlike previous sites, they have also made them very interactive and viral right out of the box.
WetPaint is much more evolutionary than revolutionary. The challenge I see with their offering is that member postings are difficult to find and are not sorted or ranked in any particular order. For example, if I wanted to find a WetPaint site whose discussion at some point revolved around the 1963 topps Pete Rose rookie baseball card and counterfeit attempts, you'd be hard pressed to ever find that level of specificity on WetPaint. They simply don't provide the search capability nor do they tag or allow users to rank postings to be able to find highest quality, most relevant content. Finally, their offering seems very similar to websites that MySpace allows you to build (for free). Other than allowing other users to edit your site, I don't see any difference.
To me, this is where many social network communities, including WetPaint fall short.
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