Wanna Make Your Own Culture?

There’s a site that a whole lot of Myspacers have been fleeing to.  It’s called Friendburst.com.

I have to admit, at first glance I didn’t really expect much.  Friendburst’s splash page is a bit underwhelming in my opinion.  But then I’m obsessed with graphics, so I’m naturally biased in that direction.

I have to say, once I got signed up and started looking around Friendburst, I was pleasantly surprised.  What may have been lacking in graphics was made up for in content and navigability.  What’s even more impressive is all of it had been put together within a month or so by Kevin (the founder) and a skeleton crew of folks.

What’s even better is Kevin openly communicates with users and does his best to integrate their suggestions and ideas into the site.  Digging through the forums, I found several instances where suggestions where made by users only to be implemented a few hours or days later by Kevin and the team at Friendburst.  That’s pretty damned impressive.  You won’t find results like that on Myspace.

So yeah, that’s all fine and dandy, but what do they have to offer users?

To begin with, there’s blogs.  The blogs are set up with a WordPress interface which I was glad to see.  Kevin’s got it set up with a ton of plugins in the interface too.  Much more than I ever use on my personal WordPress setup.  So there’s much more customization to be had than New Myspace offers.  Many of the bloggers at Friendburst are direct transplants from Myspace, so it all has a familiar feel to it.  Although it seems that much of the bullshit drama didn’t translate over, which is a great relief.

Friendburst also has a decent Forum area, built in instant messaging, and even video chat.  There’s an area where users can submit recipes, which I think is really cool.  There’s also a game area where people can play Mahjong and stuff like that.  You can also post quizzes and polls for other users to toy around with.  And of course you can upload music, photos, and video.

The profile customization on Friendburst is very similar to the Myspace 2.0 setup.  Although it is possible to do some coding tweaks, from what I’ve read.  Users are also given the ability to customize their homepage view, which is something that got stolen away from users when New Myspace went into effect.

Do you remember the way Myspace utilized bulletins as the primary way of broadcasting announcements, links, and information?  Well, Friendburst has it.  This is cool because it allows for quick transfer of in depth info between friends without clogging up the stream or having to sacrifice words due to character count constrictions.

That’s right!  Friendburst isn’t in the business of dumbing down their users.  But shhhhhhh!  Don’t let the DHS or corporate America find out.  It’ll be our little intellectual secret.  😉

I spent several hours last night digging around the site and catching up with my fellow Myspace refugees.  By the time I logged off, I had a familiar feeling buzzing around in my chest.  I realized it was the same feeling I had back in the glory days of old Myspace.  That feeling of  comfort, community, and collective hope.  That’s a good feeling.

What’s really cool to me is the fact that Friendburst is just now getting started.  This means by being early users of the platform, everyone there has the ability to influence how it develops, both culturally and structurally.  Kevin is very receptive to constructive recommendations and is constantly improving the site to better fit the needs and comfort zones of the users.  Combine that with the fresh cultural blank slate of this new internet community and the possibilities could very well become endless.  Reality is what you make of it, and this is an opportunity to build a reality that the corporate overlords at Myspace won’t allow us to have.

So anyway, I strongly suggest that if you miss the old Myspace that you give Friendburst a try.  I think you’ll like it.  It’s not every day that we get an opportunity to help birth a new culture onto the internet.  It’s not every day that we have the blessing of an admin like Kevin who actually cares and listens to the user.

If you’re interested, come and check it out at www.friendburst.com

or check out my profile at www.friendburst.com/moosehammer/