They should have listened to the old adage… 

Yocial’s whole shtick is having a single site to have both work and personal friends.

Now your colleagues at work can see how you spend your drunken after-work hours. And your friends can see how you’re a corporate drone from 9:15 to 4:45. Great. What innovation!

Update: so, apparently, you can keep your two sets of friends separate. I’ll stick with facebook and linkedin personally.

Rating:

Ning Stinks — any “platform” that enables people create social networks for people that have letter Z fetishes shouldn’t exist, in my oh so very humble opinion.

They’re all boasting that they have 115K social networks, but like 8 of them are mine and have 1 member. I know, I know–I’m sure the other 114, 992 rival Facebook and Myspace in their scale & usefulness.

Why not just create a group on a real social network? Why does everyone love it just ’cause it’s Marc, who created Netscape? Netscape isn’t cool–it was Mosaic that was cool. LoudCloud isn’t cool. Why would Ning be cool?I think I’m going to create a Marc Fan Club network on Ning.

Rating:

Zipidee bills themselves as “the internet’s largest (emphasis mine) marketplace for buying and selling digital goods online.”

The only problem is that it’s “beta” and not yet accessible to the public! I’m sure it’s bigger than say, iTunes’ 3 billions songs sold. Or ebay’s sales of digital items.

My question is: do consumers need a separate site to sell digital goods? Granted, this company claims to add DRM to items it sells, which is wildly popular with consumers. But besides creating additional restrictions for buyers, what’s the value prop?

I’m confused.

Teach The People was included in one of the TechCrunch 40. From their site: “Teach The PeopleSM is the world’s first social community and content networking service equipped with tools and features for the flexible sharing of knowledge!

Instead of just messaging with other users like on traditional social networking services, users on Teach The PeopleSM
are creating their own communities for fun, education, innovation; whatever! User can then fill those communities
with as much content & media as they desire:

Documents, Images, Videos, AUDIO, Blogs, Discussion Boards, Chat Sessions, Broadcasts…

…you name it.”

Now, read About.com’s About Us copy: Exclusive to About.com, over 600 expert “Guides” steer About.com’s content - sharing their passions, expertise and how-to information with visitors every day. The result is a vast information “bank” that couples the breadth and reach of large content providers such as AOL and MSN with the depth of consumer-focused sites like CNET and WebMD.

Sound kinda similar? But About.com was started in 1996, almost 12 freakin’ years ago.

All I’m sayin’ is Whatev.

Rating:

I guess instead of fixing the one they do have, they’re launching a new one called Mash. I’m too darn lazy to go searching for an invite for yet another social network. I’ve heard it’s kinda OK, but I’ve got a serious question for you. Does it matter?

Scribd is out there talking about how many “words” they have on their site from about 200K user-uploaded documents (much of which is copyrighted, I might add).

Here’s what I don’t get: of everything I saw on the Scribd, nothing required being in a document per se. In my exploration of the site, I found guides for this or that, top 10 lists, screenplays, etc. All of these things could (and I’m sure do) exist as web pages. And there’s this company called “Google” which helps people find web pages (and documents for that matter) over the web.

These guys are trying to be the of documents? I’m not sure there’s a need. Maybe they’ll be the Pets.com of documents.