Restricted social networks

I am not aware of how many social network services exist, but I am sure it must be hundreds if not more. Most of them operate on a "come in and find out" basis, which means that you sign up and have a look, and most often, you just stay registered, whether you really use the service or not.

Some of the services are restricted, i. e. they work on an invite-only basis. This may have the advantage that the newly registered user at least has one connection within the network if this person is invited by someone they know, but if any registered user is able to invite any other user, I do not understand what the benefit would be.

I have the impression that the networks that may prove to be the most useful to me are those where I can define what class of relationship links me to the person in question (e. g. family, friend, acquaintance, virtual contact), as it may be employed by application services built on top of a network managing service, e. g. in order to provide useful recommendations.

Zweitgeist - your alter ego on the web

Just today I became aware of a new social service that may bridge the gap between surfing the web and communicating, called zweitgeist an artificial word meaning something like your virtual alter ego or second spirit. It is based on a piece of software that needs to be downloaded as a client closely associated with your web browser. A Firefox extension is also available.

After registration, you basically start by filling out your profile, most importantly a picture representing yourself (can be selected from a large variety of characters). While the animated characters seem a bit boring at first sight, the fun starts when executing actions with them (such as waving hands, sitting down, walking etc.). That is a great extension of the speech bubbles which serve to exchange textual messages - a good approximation to non-verbal communication.

Some more information about this can be found here and there. If you want to know more about what you can do with your alter ego beyond chatting, you might want to have a look over there.

Of course while the user base is limited, you'll find most zweitgeisters on sites like google, amazon, spiegel.de or other popular pages. Thus, you might not really know whether it is worth starting a chat or not. But since I'm not the only one to find it fun to use, I suppose that there'll be more users as time goes on.

While your base account is free, there are numerous options (such as having an animated character, or multiple characters to choose from), which cost a monthly fee, expressed in a virtual currency, called kala (=stone). This fee depends on the user's reputation (and I suppose this means how excessively he's using zweitgeist). The more you invest, the more you get.

Let's see how this will be accepted in the long run. At first sight, it is fun to use, indeed.

Competition and user generated content

I somehow missed that one, but last Friday, it was in the news that Yahoo would be acquiring Bix.com, a portal for competitions of all kind. It's a 16-person startup company that basically seems to work by rating other people's content. Seems to be linked to MySpace, as there's the possibility to add a media item to one's MySpace account. So, what's the real difference between YouTube and this one? Not much, I suppose (and YouTube indeed does have user ratings as well), so I think that it's more about running after Google in order not to lose touch to what's currently hip. But what will Yahoo really do with this? What will Google do with YouTube? These questions seem not to have been answered yet. At least not really.