10 Social Sites Worth Looking At. Literally.

Posted by Paul Glazowski on July 10th, 2007

Today’s top social networks are many things. They’re popular, obviously. They’re also pretty powerful, relatively speaking. And they offer a lot of stuff in one place. Some might say too much stuff. Nonetheless, a great many people seem to find the overload to be a sign of strength.

There’s one thing, however, that the top guns in the game don’t excel with: design.

Yes, design. The field of work that (ideally) blends artistry and engineering together into products as pleasing to the eye as they are pleasing to the fingers. Unfortunately, there doesn’t always exist cohesion between artist and engineer when it comes to building sites and structures (in this case, the phenomena we call social networks) on the Web. We see the disconnect writ large at places like MySpace and so forth. Some are of more atrocious than others. But most all of them are barely tolerable.

You don’t have to make due with what’s made available by the reigning majority, though. That’s right. You don’t have to force yourself to endure ugly. You can go another, much more visually pleasing route. But there’s a tradeoff. You’ll have to forego the ultra-popular for the more moderate bustle of a far smaller network. Or networks, if plurality is your thing.

Stan Schroeder of Mashable! has done the world a wonderful courtesy by assembling a list of top-tier sites that currently inhabit the second class aesthetically gifted side of the networking world, and we would be remiss not to help reiterate the message. Some in his lineup don’t, in my view, fall into the category of social networks as well know them today (in the strictest sense of the term), but since most do, the list is definitely worth parsing. Without further adieu, we dig.

At the top of Stan’s list, there exists Virb, perhaps the most popular creation of the bunch. It’s not by any means the biggest noisemaker of the social networking world’s “second class”, but it deserves high marks simply for its attention to detail and it’s principled adherence to cleanliness. I don’t know how many times I’ve stumbled upon a MySpace page that made me want to cry foul, loudly. Virb, in short, is more or less the antithesis to king of the genre. I’ve yet to find a thematically disturbing creation born of its toolkit.

Next up, Trig. Oh, Trig, how you give one hope for brighter days in the social sphere on the Net. It’s quite close in layout to most of the biggies hogging the market space, but it’s worlds ahead in terms of pleasantness. MySpace or Facebook or any other well-established entity should buy this place up simply to get a clue about how things ought to look in 2007.

Purevolume, another pick in the list, is equal parts Trig and MOG (not on the list) in terms of music being the main attraction, while a Virb-like tidiness holds up the thematic side quite nicely. Cheers to the creators of this place.

Six other sites comprise the rest of the collection. They are: my.9rules, Pownce, Flickr (why’s that here?), Threadless (why’s that here as well?), Shelfari, and Beautiful Society, and Humble Voice.

My.9rules acts as a hub with powers similar to those in the top echelon of the industry while maintaining a pretty face.

Pownce is, well…I don’t know why exactly it’s here. Some call it a Twitter alternative, an AIM alternative, and lots of other things, but that doesn’t necessarily give it credentials as a social network. Sure, you can keep in touch with your friends, but no one else gets to find you (at least not yet; it’s all about the invites at the moment), and in my book that limitation takes it off the list.

Flickr’s in the lineup as well? What the heck. Sure you can share photos and discover others’ photos, but isn’t it a stretch to think Flickr’s fighting with Facebook for people?

Threadless. Nope. Sorry. Sure, people can vote for their favorites, and submit their own designs, but there are plenty of other sites on the Web that do just that in other ways and we don’t call them social networks. This is a shop infused with a good amount of third-party (user/customer/whathaveyou) contributions. Not much else. Sure, it’s cool, but it’s hardly a “network” as the term signifies in Web 2.0 verse.

Shelfari definitely is a social network of sorts, and it’s built around a medium I adore: books. Books, books, and more books. And it’s gorgeous, too! I do doubt the networks very large at all, but volume junkies usually enjoy small and closely-knit reading and discussion circles anyway, so at the end of the day it’s likely that everything at Shelfari works out fine for all.

Beautiful Society, I must say is not my favorite of the bunch, it’s nonetheless better than most.

Lastly, I’ll second Mr Schroeder’s assertion that Humble Voice simply “looks gorgeous.” It’s a place to go for “designers, artists and musicians,” and it presents itself in award-winning form. (Though I don’t know whether the site’s actually won any awards as of yet.) Whether you’re into music, video, photography, art, or the written word, Humble Voice will please you – in more ways than one.

So, there you go. I don’t know whether that truly is ten genuine social networks, but they’ve all got at least one major strength that the big boys lack: killer looks.

Enjoy.

Kudos to Stan Schroeder at Mashable! for putting the list together in the first place. Such a collection is indeed a much-needed one, no doubt.

Comments

No comments.

Post a comment