And we’re back! For most of us, social media services such as Digg, Twitter, and Facebook are reliable, dependable, and perfect for day-to-day use. Still, there are moments that we yearn for something a bit different. That’s where we come in. On today’s episode of Showdown, we take a look at five social media services that take “odd” to totally new and unexpected heights.
Service #1: Adocu
Website: http://adocu.com/
Service Type: Microblogging
Mainstream Equivalent: Twitter
First Impression: “After the microblogging experiment, I found that it’s actually fun. This, however … this is weird.”
Weirdness Factor (Out of 5): 3; It’s odd, but strangely intriguing.
Why It’s Weird: Adocu is the first in what is bound to be a long line of “nanoblogging” services. Naturally, a word such as that could mean different things to different people. In the case of Adocu, “nanoblogging” means one word and one word only. Obviously, you can type more than one word, but said words will not have any spaces between them.
Positives: Despite it all, it is an interesting idea.
Negatives: We cannot stress this enough: it is only one word. What can you really say with just one word?
Overall (Out of 10): 6
Service #2: Stumpedia
Website: http://www.stumpedia.com/
Service Type: Search engine/Wiki
Mainstream Equivalent: Google, Yahoo, Live Search
First Impression: “I can’t find anything!”
Weirdness Factor: 4
Why It’s Weird: Stumpedia tries to set itself apart by relying exclusively on user additions. If a user didn’t add it personally, it isn’t there.
Positives: They get points for trying something new. While it isn’t much now, it’ll be something special in a few years time.
Negatives: Quite simply, there’s absolutely nothing on it. A search for the Symbian mobile phone OS, for example, only gave us one result — a MySpace page featuring a user named Symbian. The same search in Google netted us 290,000 results. Yahoo delivered 7.52 million results. A search for “Nokia” got us a few more (read: nine) hits in Stumpedia, while the same search in Google and Yahoo produced 360,000,000 and 692,000,000 entries, respectively. To say that there is a disparagy between the engines is an understatement.
Overall: 2; “There really isn’t anything that you can do with it.”
Service #3: GreatSchools
Website: http://www.greatschools.net/
Service Type: School choice
Mainstream Equivalent: Word of mouth
First Impression: “The more I look at it, the more it makes sense. People want something like this.”
Weirdness Factor: 3
Why It’s Weird: GreatSchools takes a tried-and-true American concept — comparing your child’s education to those in other school districts — and makes it a web 2.0 application.
Positives: Barring full-on school choice, this site is the closest parents will get to being able to choose a public school for their children.
Negatives: Non-parents, or parents whose children are already grown, will not get any use out of this service. While looking up your old high school is a fun way to waste five minutes, it’s not something that you would do all of the time.
Overall: 8
Service #4: Kiva
Website: http://www.kiva.org/
Service Type: Money exchange
Mainstream Equivalent: PayPal, Green Dot, established financial institutions, friends and family, etc.
First Impression: “What’s this one again? That money laundering one?”
Weirdness Factor: 5
Why It’s Weird: “Social money lending” isn’t something that you see on a regular basis.
Positives: It’s an interesting concept.
Negatives: Neither of us necessarily felt comfortable offering up funds to strangers. The first page of listings, for example, read more like the master list of email scams than a sincere plea for funds. We’re not saying that giving money to the less fortunate is a bad thing. We just believe that there are just safer ways of going about it.
Overall: N/A, as we’re not exactly sure how to go about rating something like this.
Service #5: NowPublic.com
Website: http://www.nowpublic.com/
Service Type: Social news
Mainstream Equivalent: Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit
First Impression: “So many stories…”
Weirdness Factor: 4
Why It’s Weird: Unlike the other social news sites, NowPublic doesn’t expect you to link to and vote on articles from other sites. They expect you to write your own. External photographs and video clip are accepable, but the words that accompany them must be your own.
Positives: Despite our reservations, we must concede that this is a truly unique idea.
Negatives: In many ways, NowPublic is like Wikipedia — interesting, but too inherently biased to be considered an trustworthy news source. While it’s nice to have a variety of opinions available, it can be rather annoying when all you want is the news of the day. Other stories, although thoroughly researched, are the literary equivalent to the “fuzzy animal” human interest stories that are commonly found on the six o’clock news. No matter how well-written a piece about Area 51 or the Easter traditions of the White House might be, it doesn’t deserve to be next to a story about the economy.
Overall: 7; provided that you look at the site as a live experiment dealing with the emerging concept of “citizen journalism.” As an actual hard news source however, we give it a 3.
…Before we draw the curtain on today’s post, we have a question: What does Vince McMahon, the radio program All Things Considered, Dr. Spock, to-do lists, and those personality quizzes found in psychology textbooks and Cosmopolitan all have in common? Find out tomorrow as we continue our trek through the land of the odd.