priit@imke

In Communities and Social Computing class, Kakk gave us an assignment to familiarise with different social communities in the Internet and to write a more detailed comparison. I choosed Friendster, tribe.net, hi5.com in a very simple reason - I don’t know a thing about these communities.

Friendster

Friendster is founded in San Fransisco in 2002. With more than 31 million registered users, it is one of the largest Internet communities.

Main target groups

Users are mainly from Europe, North America, and Asia aged about 21 to 30. Younger people from Asia, and not-anymore-teenagers from Europe (Wikipedia).

Main activities

Finding old and making new friends, collegues or even dates; video sharing using Grouper, and bloging. Though owners are adding extra features, it is still more like matchmaking tool.

Special traits

Video sharing!

Controversial issues

Friendster is free to use, but blinking ads and pop-ups are really annoying. And… Friendster is a very big community and like other similar project (Orkut, for example), it has to live with forbidden content (strong sexual content, rassism etc.)

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tribe.net

Main target groups

“At tribe.net, we believe in the power of connecting to other people to get things done. Since that can be surprisingly hard in a city, we founded tribe.net to make it easier. Whether it’s for finding the right job, a killer apartment, a good restaurant, a gentle dentist, or a hiking buddy, we think those tasks are best done by connecting with other local people for advice and sharing. The people you connect to can be your friends, people who live in your neighborhood, or people who live in your city that share a common interest with you. Tribe.net makes finding those people easier.” (tribe.net)

Main activities

Main activities are sharing knowledge (and questions) through different communities. Registered users can save their favorites, create services and set up their own tribes (communities)

Special traits

Communication goes always through the communities, information sharing is very important. Every registered user can save his/her own favorites, create services, and individual tribes (communities)

Controversial issues

In a controversial move, on December 20, 2005, tribe.net decided to prohibit sexually explicit content, partially in response to the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act. Coincidentally, shortly before the rule change, tribe.net hired a new CEO, who was a regular Christian churchgoer, and somewhat socially conservative. This move disappointed many users, as tribe to that point had been notable for an exceptionally permissive content policy. (Wikipedia)

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hi5.com

Main target groups

Quite big number of bands are represented in this portal. Opportunity to upload music and picture makes it easy to use to whom HTML-code is something alien or they don’t have time and tools to build up their own web-page.

Main activities

Main activities are messaging, using bulletin boards, groups, and journals. It strongly depends on users interests too.

Special traits

- Music (Beta): Musicians can upload their songs to hi5, users can add up to 15 songs by adding the hi5 Musicplayer to their profile and can purchase the songs via iTunes or REAL. Editorial provided in 5 genres; Hip-Hop, R&B, Electronic, Rock and Reggaeton.
- Photos: Users can store up to 1 Gigabyte of photos, create up to 100 albums on his/her hi5 account. Each album can hold up to 250 photos, provided it does not exceed the total album capacity of 50 MB.
- Chat: Users can use the online chatrooms to chat with each other.
- HTML Scripting: Users can add HTML to their profiles, a feature not provied by others. JavaScript, however, is stil not allowed.
- One trait could be optional online journal for every user. (hi5.com)

Controversial issues

With so many different capabilities, it is easy to get lost and also using the portal efficently seems to be more difficult than rest of those mentioned portals.