FUTURE SHOPPING BAZAR

The recent launch of Silicon Valley funded adult/porn site Zivity raised a few eyebrows. Now one of the old sovereigns of sexy is getting into the game, too. CrunchGear reports that Playboy is launching their own sexy social networking site just for college students, Playboy U.

Playboy U requires all users to have a .edu email addresses, mimicking Facebook’s early policy of only allowing college students to join. They say, “Sorry, but high schoolers, old dudes and your Mom can’t join”. However, The site won’t be as lascivious as the periodical. In what may be a bummer for some, the site will be “an exclusive college-only non-nude social network”. Furthermore, it will be a place to “show your school pride, connect with other students and celebrate the social side of college”. But I’m sure they’re not going to police the whole network for porn.

Student profiles will consist of the usual social network features including, bios, photos, videos, Blogs, and Forums. Schools will have customized pages, parties and on-campus events, and a national radio show with student callers.

Other magazines have been trying to get with the times and fight floundering readership by launching their own social networks too. Rolling Stone recently announced plans for their own network as well. But Playboy may have some better luck with readership already skewing toward the college following.

Lots of college students lament the loss of their exclusive Facebook social network to the older crowd. They may be receptive to a newer, cooler alternative. Something tells me that Playboy may not be the brand to steal their hearts, though.

http://www.techcrunch.com/

Labels: And, can’t, Credibility, dudes, join”, Mom, Network: “High, old, Pictures”, Playboy Launches Social, schoolers, Something, Your

Hispanic social network TierraNatal launched in July with a model that seeks to reunite Mexicans where ever they live.

The bilingual site focuses on location based networking with users being asked to specify their place of birth (or hometown) in Mexico. Users are encouraged to use the service as a way of keeping in contact with friends and relatives who might have moved elsewhere, such as the United States. Over 300,000 Mexican towns and cities are listed.

Design wise it’s one of the better social networking sites I’ve seen in recent times. The usual array of social networking features (profiles, pics, blogs etc) are combined with some decent looking graphics and a functional layout that works well.

The site competes with Spanish language/ Mexican focused version of MySpace and LatinoAIM Pages.

TierraNatal was founded by Liliana Townshend and was developed by San Diego based Digital Telepathy.

Labels: America, Connecting, FutureBazarOnline.com, in, Marketplace; Users, Mexicans, North, Pictures”, TierraNatal:

Vancouver based MyProgress offers a service that provides progress monitoring features (generally used in computer role playing games) for life tracking.

MyProgress allows users to track their personal finances, skills, “knowledges”, wealth and health dynamics.

The site tracks every piece of information users enter, from a new purchase, capital gains, an hour of photographic or driving experience, or a rental price change, and provides a detailed overview on how fast they are progressing in comparison with the others across multiple categories, such as age, occupation, and location. The service provides analytics about user’s life and build forecasts based on past data.

MyProgress is billed as the world’s first online application “designed to helping an individual [not a corporate] manage their progress and read their life log as an RSS feed.”

Labels: Edward, Facebook, FutureBazarOnline.com, handsfree speaker, integrated handsfree speaker, Lets, mp3 capability, Mueller, My, Pictures”, Progress, samsung, Track, You, Your

Here’s a me-too service that won’t last long. Yappd, a Twitter clone, launched today. In their email to us they describe themselves as “Twitter with picture messaging,” and that pretty much sums it up. It is a service that allows you to quickly tell the world what you are up to. You can add content via their website, email or sms.

So while we debate whether Kevin Rose’s Pownce, another recent entrant to this space, is different enough from Twitter to become successful, yet another hopeful young gun enters the space with little to differentiate itself except the addition of a photo to your status messages.

Unless Yappd has a brilliant marketing strategy up their sleeve, I don’t expect them to get much traction. I do like the photo feature, though. Hopefully Twitter will add it soon.

My Yappd account is here. Don’t even think about adding me.

Labels: “Twitter, Calls, FutureBazarOnline.com, Itself, Launches, Pictures”, With, Yappd