Today, the Associated Press reported, that four families filed separate lawsuits against News Corp (MySpace), claiming that their 14 and 15 year old daughters were sexually assaulted by pedophiles they met on-line.  The families, located in New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, are seeking millions of dollars damages, claiming that MySpace didn’t initiate strong enough security measures to protect their children from solicitation from adults. Jason A. Itkin, a lawyer with Arnold & Itkin, one of the law firms representing one of the suits said:

“In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users… Hopefully these lawsuits can spur MySpace into action and prevent this from happening to another child somewhere.”

These lawsuits aren’t the first of their kind.  In June 2005, a mother in Texas sued MySpace and News Corp for $30,000,000 in damages, claiming that her 14-year old daughter was sexually assaulted by a 19 year old man, who it is alleged, lied to the girl by claiming he was a senior in high school and luring her into a false sense of trust.

In response to the lawsuits filed today, Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, issued a statement saying:

MySpace serves as an industry leader on Internet safety and we take proactive measures to protect our members… We provide users with a range of tools to enable a safer online experience.

Nigam went on to discuss the responsibility of users and their parents to “engage in open family dialogue” about on-line safety, transferring valuable off-line lessons to on-line interactions.  The most recent step in the right direction came when MySpace announced that it would introduce parental notification.  (I’ll be interested to see how that works.)

While it is a sad reality that creepy people (including sexual predators) exist and that pedophiles use social networking sites to target children, I agree with Nigam.  Social networking websites must take security seriously.  However, it is right to blame social networking sites for the criminal activity of their members.  Doing so devalues the importance of parental responsibility, stifles technical innovation within social media, and perpetuates what is already an overly litigious culture in America.

Criminals are to blame for their own criminal behavior.  Parents have the responsibility to educate themselves and their children about the dangers that exist on-line and talk about how to avoid them.  The tough part is that because technology and “what’s cool to kids” changes quickly, it is difficult for the average parent to keep up to speed.

Organizations like Perverted Justice are doing their part to seek out on-line predators.  I wonder whether the world would benefit from a new, multi-national public-private partnership, whose aim is to educate parents and kids about the dangers that exist on-line (how to avoid them, how to report suspicious or unlawful behavior, etc.).  Regionally, members of this partnership could focus on developing legislation that protects kids.  I’d like to believe that this idea could work, but I’m realistic enough to know that it would be an uphill battle, likely fraught with bureaucracy and red tape.

Citizens of the world have identified a problem that is crying out for a strong, targeted, and evolving solution. While I don’t propose to know what the answer is, suing MySpace isn’t it.

If you have ideas, post a commment.

Jimmy Wales from Wikia (a collection of sites users can edit) and Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit)  spoke at last night’s Social Media Club meeting at CNET‘s office in San Francisco, CA.

Themes from Wales’ talk included several social media lessons he learned from Wikipedia:

• Give users accountability rather than being a gatekeeper of information and you’ll get excellent insights.
• Don’t reprimand users for their bad behavior on line. Instead, praise good users (posts, comments, etc) and validate peers you respect. People crave validation.
• Take a neutral point of view policy. Make sure users know there is no such thing as a “right answer”… just an open discussion and positive effort.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Social Media Club, go to: http://www.socialmediaclub.com.

Thanks to Chris Heuer & team for a great event last night.

I posted this from my Treo 750 (and later edited with bullets and hyperlinks on my mac).

Mobile Blog: Jimmy Wales from Wikia

Post Script: Did you know that Wikipedia:

• Operates with only 5 full time employees? The rest of the folks involved are all volunteers
• Recently raised $1 Million USD at a fundraising event. This amount is equivalent to to total expenditures of Wikipedia last year.
• Has twice the number of visitors than CNN and ABC combined.

Check out the Wikipedia humorous spoof: Uncyclopedia. It is one of the funniest pages on-line and a great example of collaborative humor and social media success.

Everyone in marketing is talking about “social media” these days.  I’d be tempted to add the term “Social Media” to my “bullshit bingo” card, except that as you can probably tell from my previous blog posts, I like social media.  In 2007, developing an effective Social Media strategy is an important part of developing a successful and multi-pronged marketing strategy.  The problem is that with so many companies jumping on the “social media marketing bandwagon,” so quickly, marketing-focused social networking sites are running the risk of reaching saturation point, and many marketers are not taking the time to think strategically about how to use social media to their advantage.

There are many examples of social media marketing efforts that have reaped excellent results, but there are even more examples of such efforts that have gone awry, sucking valuable marketing dollars without having much impact.  Yesterday, blogger Jerry Bowles wrote an interesting blog on FASTforward.  In it, he discusses how corporations are using social media to capture new audiences.  The article mentions successful uses of social media in corporate marketing like MyCoke.com and Carnival Connections as well as ineffective attempts like MyDream.tv by Lincoln and Ford Bold Moves. At the end of his blog, Bowles concludes:

“The major truth of corporate-sponsored social media campaigns is that no matter how good they are or how sensitive they are to the concerns of the “community,” they won’t improve the bottomline unless you have something to sell that people want.”

I couldn’t agree more with Bowles final comment.  Adding to it, part of the problem with failed social media marketing campaigns is that they’re not well devised from the start.  Let me explain…

There are two basic ways to employ a social media strategy:
Create a stand-alone social media site, or
Leverage existing social media sites to your company’s advantage (e.g. YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, Second Life, etc.).

In an ideal universe, before deciding which tactic to employ, companies should be very clear about the objective(s) of their social media marketing campaign.  Many companies aren’t clear about their objectives, and I believe this is because:

1. The “science” of social media is too new and largely undocumented/undefined and
2. Companies who do not yet have a social media marketing strategy feel pressured to come up with something quickly, lest they fall behind the curve.

By defining the goals of a social media marketing campaign more tightly from the start, companies will have a better chance and building a solution that meets that goal.

If the goal of employing a social media marketing strategy is to bolster enthusiasm for a specific product among a group that is already using that product, or expose existing customers/ enthusiasts a particular product to a new product from the same company, then developing a stand-alone social media site, like MyCoke.com, may make sense.  However, before building a stand-alone social media site, a company must already have a very strong base of customer enthusiasts who like to talk about their experiences with products on-line (i.e.: Coke, Apple, Mini Cooper, etc.) and be ready to offer something materially different/ better than those users can get elsewhere.  Creating a stand-alone social media site is an expensive endeavor, but if it is done correctly, for the right reasons, and targeted towards the right contingent, at the least, the likely result is increased web traffic to the company’s website.  MyCoke.com and Carnival Connections (both mentioned in Bowles’ blog) are two good examples. Whether having a well used, stand-alone social media site translates to higher sales remains to be seen, but increased web traffic from customers can’t be a bad thing.

However, in a world where consumers are increasingly being bombarded with so many social media and social networking options, it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to succeed in creating stand-alone social media marketing sites that have a sustainable and positive marketing impact and drive traffic.  In my opinion, the safest option for marketers that are trying to attract the attention of prospective customers that are not yet familiar with their specific product, company, or brand, is piggybacking off of existing social media sites – like YouTube, Friendster, MySpace, Gather, Vox, Second Life, etc. to attract attention to their products/services.  It helps to learn how to walk before you try to run.

Today, the self-proclaimed “tech gossip rag,” Valleywag, published the following graph, suggesting that Social Networking is past its peak from a media coverage perspective:

011107-valleywag

Valleywag writes:

The social network — the umbrella term for features of a website which allow users to track their friends — is past its peak.

Mentions in the press of “social network” or another even uglier phrase, “social networking”, reached 1,158 in September, but have declined since. That could mean a decline in media interest in sites like Myspace and Facebook or, more likely, an acceptance that all media will be social, all successful sites will allow users to “friend” eachother, and that it’s no longer interesting to spotlight a feature so ubiquitous.

It is true that when a trend reaches critical mass, news media loses interest… “News” is only considered “News” if it is, in fact, “new”.  Case in point- the growth of corporate websites in the early 1990s… The first corporations to build websites made international news.  Today, I can’t think of any large, successful company that doesn’t have a website.  Websites are now a prerequisite for big business.  One day, the same will be true of “Social Networking” and “Social Media”…. I’m not convinced that that time is now, or that the recent downturn indicated by Valleywag’s graph is indicative of a “trend”. Instead, I think it is indicative of stabilization in the market following several months of very big news.  (And, while I have no empirical evidence to support this, it may also be indicative of a shift away discussing “social networking” alone towards discussing “social media” as a whole.  If any of you have seen evidence one way or another on this, please post a comment.)

I’ve numbered several points on the graph to illustrate my point about stabilization.  Looking at the popularity of the word “social networking” in relation to some of the big events on-line over the course of the last year is interesting:

1. July 18, 2005: News Corporation acquires Intermix Media, Inc and MySpace
2. March 2006: MySpace was the second most trafficked site on the Internet (next to Google) with Facebook at number 7. At times, MySpace had more traffic than Google (Duffy, 2006)… And – Hitwise “US Consumer Generated Media Report,” reports that visits to MySpace increased 51 percent March-September 2006, outpacing the 34 percent overall growth for the social-net category during the same period.
3. May, 2006: comScore Network reports that Myspace surpassed 50 Million U.S. visitors in May.  The Top 50 Web Rankings and Analysis report released by comScore Media Metrix in may suggests that online interest in the World Cup and NBA Championships and the Spring television season drove traffic to popular social networking sites (see graph) http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=906
4. October 6, 2006: Rumors about Google acquiring YouTube started on TechCrunch.  October 9, 2006: Google acquires YouTube

The “major” events in “social networking” over the last year or so have definitely been considered big news.  The general public, companies, and media outlets seem eager to watch how social media is changing the on-line and business landscapes. Sure, the apparent “lag” in the term “social networking” since October may be the start of a downward trend. In my opinion, it is more likely a brief correction in the market following the major news around Google’s acquisition of YouTube in September and rumors about Yahoo’s social media strategy.  After all, the graph indicates that the term “social networking” is still as popular now as it was back in August, which was the highest it had ever been before.

As the number of mainstream companies announce the integration of s-commerce/ social media into their overall marketing strategies, I suspect that the term “social networking” will be surpassed by more broad categorizations like “s-commmerce” or “social media” of which, “social networking” is a component.

For any non-VOXers who want to post comments, feel free to email me, and I’ll manually post your comments.

Note: As I was doing research for this blog, I discovered that Google News doesn’t allow historical searches of news articles between specific dates. If anyone has a site that they can recommend that allows for a historical news search between specific dates, I’d love to hear from you.

Sources:
Michael Duffy, 2006. “A dad’s encounter with the vortex of Facebook,” Time (19 March).

Gather is a social networking site for adults. It is free, fun, well organized, and a little bit like vox, though it encourages cross posting of blogs, articles, comments, etc. around specific “groups” of participants with similar interests.  There are some really interesting blogs, conversations, and participants happening on Gather…

For example, one of America’s most well known criminal lawyers, Alan Dershowitz has a group on Gather and is in the midst of publishing a six part series of articles on a variety of controversial, and politically fueled topics.

Today, Borders launched a new group on Gather, making it one of the many companies that is now using social networking to further business by reaching out to prospective customers.

Borders-community

Gather works on a revenue sharing model, not unlike other social media sites like Revver.  Here’s how Gather’s  CEO describes it:

Gather is a place for you to connect with people who share your passions. It’s a place where you can contribute thought, art, commentary, or inspiration. We will reward you for all the great things you will share with others in your communities of interest. And together, we think we will create a pretty special place to hang out online.
Gather will make money by displaying advertising to people who use Gather’s services. It just seems fair that we share our advertising revenue with you based on the quality and popularity of the content you contribute on Gather. We will also share some of our revenue with you if you choose to use the site actively, exploring content that others write, searching on Gather and on the web, and inviting your friends, family, and colleagues to use the site. We will pay occasional users in points that you will be able to use to purchase goods and services from Gather partners in a few months. We will pay frequent users, who write great content consistently, in cash if they choose.

I think Gather is a really interesting site. I like the way that it makes adults with similar interests discoverable to each other.  I’ve only used it for a short time, so I’ll be interested to see what my longer-term impressions are.  To test Gather.com a bit more and hopefully extend the readership of this blog, I’ve set up my own Gather group: socialmediagroup.gather.com. I hope that people will use this group to share information on social media, social networking, web 2.0, mobile 2.0 and related topics.

Do you use Gather? If so, post a comment and let me know what you think.

I know, I know, this blog is meant to be about social media and social networking, but I couldn’t resist writing about another piece of new technology that I know well – the Treo 750, one of the newest GSM Windows Mobile phones on the market.  On January 5th, Palm, Inc. announced the launch of the Treo 750 on Cingular.  This is the second major release from Palm in the last couple of months.

I’ve been using the Treo 750 as my primary phone for the past seven months (I was a business development, developer relations, and marketing consultant at Palm, Inc., so I got early access to the device**).  The Treo 750v has the same hardware as the Treo 750 but the two devices are branded differently because they’re on different carriers (Treo 750v on Vodafone, Treo 750 on Cingular).  Despite having spent significant time working at Palm, I believe that the following review unbiased and fair.  In my opinion, as a power-user of mobile phones, the Treo 750v is the best smartphone on the market, but as with every product, there is always room for improvement. (more…)

There is a great article in the January 15 issue of BusinessWeek on Web 2.0 and Social Media in China: “China: Falling Hard for Web 2.0”.  Check it out!

Further to my posting about WAYN I learned about TripHub.com, which helps users organize trips with their friends and family.  It combines travel research facilities, blogging capabilities, and invitation tracking (like Evite) into one easy interface.  The site allows users to shop for hotels, flights, and activities and share this information with others.

There’s an important distinction between sites like WAYN and TripHub.  While WAYN focuses on “chance encounters” and helping users find travel partners, TripHub allows users to interact with those who are already in their network of friends and familiy and organize the details of a trip with a specific list of invited participants.

TripHub features a very easy, well designed user-interface and integrates with leading travel sites like Hotels.com, Expedia.com, Orbitz, and Travelocity, which makes organizing the various aspects of trips within the US easy.  Users planning trips outside of the US, will still find TripHub useful for communicating with prospective and confirmed travel groups, but digging on external sites for foreign hotels is required, as Hotels.com, only allows users to search for hotels located in the states.

While I think that TripHub is a neat site as-is, there is room for the incorporation of additional social networking features.   Namely, I’d like to see users be able to post personal profiles and search for like-minded people who are looking for specific types of travel partners that are going on trips to particular locations.  For example, it would be great if users could post their profile on TripHub and ensure that only a specific demographic could see it and connect: (i.e: men and/or women between X and Y ages, located within Y miles of X city in Y state and Z country, looking to take a X day long vacation, costing between $X,000-$Y,000 to one of the following “wish list” locations (by city, country, or continent, etc.).  Alternatively, it would be great to see TripHub partner up with WAYN or a similar site to allow users to find travel partners and then plan trips accordingly.  I’d also like to see TripHub integrate with an international photo-sharing and printing site so that users can share pictures from their trips and the option to order each other’s photo books after the trip.

If you’ve used TripHub before, please post a comment with your thoughts.  If you’re a non-VOXer, and would like to post a comment, send me an email with your comments, and I’ll post them on-line.

I’ve been hearing a lot about WAYN (acronym for “Where Are You Now”) over the last few months.  WAYN is a social networking site focused on travelers, where community members can exchange travel tips and meet others who will be in the same place at the same time. With some calling it the “MySpace of Travel,” I figured it was time to do some research and take WAYN for a test drive

WAYN’S HISTORY:

Headquartered in London with back office operations in Poland, WAYN was founded in 2002 by three friends, Pete Ward, Jerome Touze and Mike Lines.  Initial funding came from Friends Reunited founder, Steve Pankhurst.  At the end of November 2006, WAYN secured a $11M (£5.7M) from a combination of high-profile investors including Brent Hoberman (co-founder of UK-based budget travel company, Lastminute.com), Esprit Capital Partners (British VC fund), Adrian Critchlow and Andy Phillips (Co-founders of Active Hotels), David Soski and Hugo Burge (Cheapflights) and Constant Tedder (co-founder and MD of Jagex).  This month, Hoberman will join WAYN as non-executive Chairman.

WAYN has experienced exceptional growth – from 45,000 users in 2005 to over 7 million today. The site boasts users from all over the world, but it is especially popular among the “gap year” contingent in Commonwealth countries like the UK, Australia, South Africa, etc., where many students travel the world for a year before going to University.  Unsurprisingly (given the estimated number of US passport holders), WAYN doesn’t yet have as much traction in the US. The following graphs from Alexa are useful indicators of the progress WAYN has made over the last three years:

WAYN Daily Traffic Rank (3 year trend through 4 Jan 2007):

Wayn-daily-traffic-alexa

WAYN Daily Page Views (3 year trend through 4 Jan 2007)

Wayn-daily-pageviews

WAYN Daily Reach Per Million (3 year trend through 4 Jan 2007):

Wayn-3yr-alexa

A site re-fresh in March of 2006 did well to bolster membership, and according to an article on Yahoo Finance, there are more improvements to come, thanks to the recent $11 M investment of Hoberman and Co:

The Funding will be used to create new revenue streams, expand the team – particularly in Poland where WAYN’s back office operations are managed; enlarge the geographical base of the company and increase the range of online and offline products offered, including a tailored trip planner; expand the ability to share experiences with others using rich media content; and provide exclusive travel and lifestyle benefits to its members. WAYN will also be upgrading its IT infrastructure to help ensure that it is able to support its fast growing active membership base.

WAYN’s competitors include: igougo.com, Gusto.com, Tripmates.com, Tripconnect.com, TripAdvisor.com, and VirtualTourist.com, all of which offer a slightly different flavor of on-line travel networking.

WAYN REVIEW:

Advocates of sites like WAYN believe that being able to broadcast your location to people in your network will revolutionize the way that people meet and interact.  As a management consultant, who used to travel to unfamiliar locations regularly, I like the idea of being able to immediately know if I’ve got friends nearby while I’m traveling and/or meet other travelers who are gong to the same location.  However, I also recognize the potential dangers of broadcasting your location to the public – especially if, say, you’ve got a stalker or your friends have ever called you a weirdo magnet.  Putting privacy issues to the side, I was excited about the idea of WAYN and looked forward to engaging with the community.

I started off by clicking the “Take The Tour” button on WAYN.com, which, as it turns out, like the rest of the site, was a bit slow.  (Good thing that some of the $11 Million investment in WAYN is going towards improving the site’s infrastructure.) Throughout the demo, a side banner flashed repeatedly: “It’s 100% FREE to join WAYN! Register Now”…This, as it turns out, is a bit misleading (more about this shortly).

After trudging my way through the flash demo, I clicked the “Join Now” button.  Registrants are asked to upload information about themselves – including visual descriptors, interests, contact details, mobile number, the details of trips they’ve been on/are going on, and more.  Users also have the option of uploading all of their contacts from several popular web-based email programs.  The enrollment process was straightforward, but it was also a bit clunky and time consuming (extensive drop-down menus that couldn’t be tabbed through, limited options to choose from under “interests”, etc.).

After registration, I was taken to a landing page.  It was here that I learned that while WAYN is free to join, membership is not particularly useful unless you pay for an upgrade.  Strangely, information about the different tiers of membership and associated costs are not advertised on WAYN’s  home page or at any point in the registration process.  In fact, you don’t find out about pricing until you complete free registration and start interacting with the site.  Even then, the only indication that there are different tiers of membership is a banner on the right hand side of the member’s main page:

I was frustrated not to learn about the various tiers of membership, before taking the time to register my personal details.  I think it is important for websites to be up-front about costs.  As it turns out, standard membership is free, but full membership costs $9.99 a month, with discounts if you order three months or one year at a time (3 month commitment= $5.99/month, 1 year commitment= $2.99/month)*.

Wayn-membership-compare

There is also an innocuous third tier of membership called VIP, which isn’t well explained until after you’ve upgraded to Full membership:

Wayn-full-vs-vip

My initial impressions of WAYN.com post-registration were mixed.  On the plus-side, WAYN allows you to:

• See the self-declared location of each of contacts/friends on a world map and learn about their upcoming trips
• Make new contacts/friends who are going to be in the same place as you
• Send an SMS to any of your friends/contacts worldwide
• Chat on-line using the WAYN Instant Messenger
• Upload all of your contacts from Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail to your WAYN account in one click – see who is already a member of the site and see the location of members
• Tell friends/contacts where you’re going and keep on-line Travel Journals to share with those in your network
• See who you know that is on-line and find out who has been looking at your profile
• Upload your photos and store them by location
• Maintain a WAYN-specific mailbox to send email to any of your contacts or groups of contacts.
• Chat with your contacts and other travelers via the WAYN Forum/ chatboards.  Get travel advice and make new friends

There is no doubt that WAYN is feature rich, but the user interface design and web taxonomy leave plenty of room for improvement.  My initial thoughts are as follows:

• Crowded real-estate – overburdened with ads and text.  I don’t believe that users who pay a subscription fee for a social networking service should also have to  see a barrage of unsolicited ads once they’ve logged into the site.
• Confusing interface – The layout on WAYN’s landing page is frustrating.  It is difficult to find what you’re looking for quickly.  The menu banner is down the left hand side of the page (as opposed to the top of the page as with most websites), so you can’t see all of your options without scrolling down the page.
• The website and menu taxonomy are ill conceived:
  • The menu items don’t appear to be listed in any particular order.  They’re not listed alphabetically or in an order that I would classify as useful.  “Search,” for example, which I suspect is one of the most popular menu items, is hidden amongst a stack of less useful menu items and a rotating advertisement.
  • There are too many menu choices and there is duplication across them.  For example, the “Who is online” button links to a page that only shows you members that are on-line in a particular country. Users can’t narrow this down to a state or city.  This is completely useless for users in an enormous country like America.  If you want to know who is on-line in a particular city, you have to pick the “search” button in the menu, which appears three buttons below the “Who’s Online” button. (see pictures below of one WAYN page in three parts – It was too long to screenshot in one go).
    

Wayn-screenshot

Wayn-screenshot-2

• Search is cumbersome –

• When you click the “Search” button, and do a search, it is impossible to narrow down the search results by adding criteria without clicking the “back” button in your browser until you get back to the main search page.
• If you want to find users that are close to you in age, you’re limited to only searching within the following age classifications: 18-20, 21-24, 25-30, 31-40, Over 40.  You are restricted to searching one group at a time. This is inconvenient to anyone who is on the upper or lower end of a particular age range. It seems odd to me that users can’t set their own age search criteria (e.g. 28-36, etc.)
  

Aside from disliking the interface, I struggled to find members with whom I had much, if anything in common.  As with any social networking site, WAYN is only as good as the network of people who use it.  WAYN doesn’t appear to have a critical mass of users in San Francisco, CA, USA.  Despite this, I did get a ton of pings people in far-flung locations with creepy looking pictures emailing to say “Hello.”  This was quite possibly the nail in the coffin for me and the current version of WAYN. There’s nothing quite like getting loads of unsolicited emails from letchy looking men, with whom I share nothing obvious in common and who look old enough to be my father to turn me off of frequenting a website. As I’ve said before in my blog, with the growth of Social Media/Social Networking, privacy is key. As a paying user, I feel that I should be allowed to specify the demographic details of the people who see my profile – not just the people I search for – say “Men and Women between 26 and 38 who plan to be in London between X and Y date.”

A couple of other nitpicky observations about WAYN – The “About us” section doesn’t say anything about WAYN as a company.  There are no executive profiles, discussions of corporate philosophy, or corporate aspirations listed.  In addition, the bottom of the home page, which hypes “WAYN in the News” features seven media logos, but none of them are hyperlinked.

Don’t get me wrong – WAYN is a fantastic social media concept with a lot of potential – both for prospective travelers and for travel businesses.  The ability for travelers to connect with each other and share inside experiences on their travels is phenomenal.  For businesses, sites like WAYN offer an opportunity to make their on-line ad campaigns more targeted and maximize the results of on-line ad spend.  As The Times Online recently reported:

Smart travel companies are using these sites to improve their business. They spot the targeted advertising opportunities offered by a site such as WAYN – where, for example, they can discover that 500 people in the Oxford area are thinking of going on holiday to the West Coast of America.

It is very probably that with $11M in the bank and leadership from Brent Hoberman, WAYN will evolve into the type of site I’d like to use.  For now, WAYN is a good start with a lot of opportunity for improvement.  To summarize, what I’d like to see:

• Less cluttered UI
• Better website taxonomy
• More bang for the buck (e.g. no ads/ pop-ups) OR a free, ad supported service
• Streamlined search facility
• Increased base of US users
• Improved privacy features for paid-for users

Have you tried WAYN? If so, please post a comment.

*Thank you to WAYN, who provided me with full membership (for one month) to evaluate the site.

Today, I got a very nice email from the Marketing Manager at Indeed.com.  She wanted to provide clarification on a few of the comments that appear regarding my December 30th posting about job trends in social media.  However, as a non Voxer, she couldn’t provide comments. She says she tried to enroll for Vox, but she ran into problems registering, so she emailed me instead.

I’d love to see a couple of new features added to Vox – including the ability for non-Voxers to comment on posts without registering for the service.  Just because you want to respond to a blog doesn’t mean you want one yourself.  One of the greatest features of Vox is the ability for users to make their posts public or private. Those of us who choose to make our posts public, want to see members of the public comment!  I’d love to see public commenting incorporated as a feature.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Vox…

• It is free and easy
  
• It is organized well
• It is easy to find people with similar interests
• There is a sense of community
• I got a great address for my blog
• etc.

But, there are a handful of features that I’d like to see added.  In the past few weeks, a few people have emailed me asking why I don’t switch to another free service like WordPress.  Yesterday, I signed up for a WordPress account to try it out. I didn’t like it as much as Vox, but it does have some of the extra features I’d like to have.

For now, I’ll stick with Vox, but if any of you great folks at Six Apart are reading, I’d love to see the following incorporated into Vox:

• The ability for non-Vox users (members of the public) to post feedback on Vox blogs
  
• A counter tool.  Right now, it is impossible to know who is reading your blog without getting comments/email.  And, since members of the public can’t comment, that makes the number of comments limited.
  
• The ability to incorporate HTML code into blogs (for things like buttons, etc.)
  
• The ability to hyperlink photos/logos in blogs
  
• Tracking back on comments – allow bloggers to respond to comments that appear on their blog without having to post a new comment of their own
  

If you’re a Vox blogger who would like to see these features as well, please write a blog entitled: “Six Apart: Why Can’t Non-Voxers Post Comments? (and other feature ideas)”. Please use the tags: blog, Vox, comments, trackbacks, Six Apart, and whatever else you feel is appropriate.   Alternatively, feel free to post a comment on my blog with your ideas.

As always, if you’re a non-Voxer and have feedback, please email me.