Ok, we get it. Everyone loves Tumblr and Twitter and even FriendFeed. But, there has to be more out there, right? More than just those few and lovely ventures funded by the same few companies? Well, I present to you a round up of the social media underdogs. From start-ups to big companies, we can’t all be winners.
Yahoo! Meme
This is Yahoo’s latest adventure into social networks. And once again, (see: Mash) they are too late to the game to matter. Is their interface nice? Yes Will there ever be a big enough user base in english-speaking countries for it to matter to me? No. Also, they don’t let you change the look of your “meme” at all. Not even on Twitter levels.
Posterous
Posterous is kind-of a Tumblr competitor? I ask because It has this nice feature where it posts automatically to all sorts of publishing tool automatically. It’s basically a Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter/etc. blogging tool that happens to also keep all of your posts in blog-format on your user.posterous.com site. It’s great if you need to get your content everywhere at once.
Vox
There is an interesting story behind Vox. Why have I heard of it? It was pushed by Leo Laporte back in the day. Upon joining I got a very distinct livejournal-y vibe about it. And that’s kind-of what it has become… a place for groups of people to share content with only the people they want to see the content. Basically, if you used live journal in the 90’s, your mom would probably like Vox now. That’s what a lot of the content is now: Look at my kids! But, it’s a great platform and I’m kind-of pumped to see them integrate pownce.com technology into the mix.
This is probably my favorite of underdogs. It started way back when as a place for artists to share the stuff that they make. Recently, the back-end has received a make-over to give it the functionality of a tumblr-like website. But, the core community is still as artsy as ever and the content is of a far higher quality than I’ve ever seen on Tumblr. Sadly, none of of friends use this lovely service. So, it’s a bit useless to me for now. Do I try and spread the word? Yes. Does anyone ever listen when I evengelize my social-networks-of-the-week? Not after everyone I know joined Mash and it faded away.
Hi5
This used to be a moderately popular “clone” of MySpace. Today, it unveiled a new focus: games. Thus, Hi5 is now obsolete. Why would someone go to a separate site to play the games that they already play on Facebook, etc? No clue. Good going Hi5. Hope you enjoy getting compared to OMGPOP now.
