Duncan Riley of TechCrunch blogged today about Damsels in Success, a new business-oriented social site for professional women. The name is of course a play on "Damsels in Distress."

Duncan felt that because he was male, he was "totally unqualified to pass judgement" on the site. I think Duncan's judgement would have been ok, but I admire his sentiment. I'm male, too, but I'll try to give it an honest review. I will agree that, like Duncan, I'm not part of the site's target community, and so I can't promise to know whether it'll meet the particular needs of women or not. So I'll try to keep my review focused on how it does as a social network in general, based on my opinion (of course).

Features

Nice looking site. I definitely see the LinkedIn angle, w/ the Jobs section being so prominent. Then again, the site is about women & business. When you register, there are a number of required fields (e.g. age) that could be a turnoff.

The "stories" feature is neat, since they're not just random blog posts, but instead posted as answers to specific questions, giving the site owners a chance to encourage users to contribute, steer the content, & keep it aligned w/ the theme.

The forums are run by up to 50 "damsels," and only they can start threads, although anyone can comment on an existing thread. There's also an advice/ask the expert area, where the expert blogs about community-submitted questions and people can comment.

Issues

Three main downsides that I see:

The name

Overall, more (female) TechCrunch commenters seemed to feel the name was a lame, cutesy pun off a sexist statement, rather than sharp and clever. I think the name is fine, but it may hurt their acceptance and turn off a percentage of the very people they want to attract. Then again, there may be people who love the name(?).

Profile section

The actual profile section feels a bit watered down, but I suspect that's because the site is still pretty new. I'm sure they'll flesh it out as the community grows. And maybe I've been looking at too many "fancy" social networks these days. There are a number of required profile fields (e.g. age) that I'm not sure why they're required, and could be a turnoff.

Restricted User Generated Content

Maybe I missed it, but it doesn't seem like ordinary members can initiate a new topic or line of thought anywhere (other than by thread hijacking, or by sending in a question to the Advice area & hoping it gets blogged about). You can only respond or comment on existing questions, posts, and topics created by either the site owners or the up-to-50 official "damsels."

If I wanted to ask the community a new question (e.g. "What other social networks would you recommend for women in business?"), I wouldn't be able to.

I can see how "steering" content can help encourage participation, strengthen a theme, and reduce off-topic threads, but I still think community members should be allowed to start threads to ask something new, otherwise they may go elsewhere if they don't see their particular question. Even a "General Discussion" type forum would help.

I assume this was a deliberate design decision by the site, and I'd be interested in learning more about the rationale. And again, I may be missing something.

Technology

From a technology angle, it's written in ASP.NET -- something you don't see very often for startups. I'm glad to see .NET being used, as Rails & PHP (or at least Rails) often get all the love.

Monetization

Since jobs are featured so prominently, my guess that the site will eventually offer some sort of fee-based "enhanced" job posting. I've seen loads of blogs & communities allowing me to post a 30-day job ad for $75-$300, so perhaps there's some money to be made in the niche job site market. Most social networks' revenue models seem to be restricted to "ads", "get acquired", and/or "huh?", so perhaps it's nice to see a change of pace.

Revenue could also be gained from advertising, but that's pretty much a given.

Conclusion

Yet another social network, but I haven't seen many in that particular niche, and I think the business/jobs focus and atypical revenue possibilities might help it rise above the tide. I really think they need to loosen the controls on the content, though, otherwise the community might go to a less restricted site. I'm also a bit concerned about the name, but maybe it just means that there's room in the niche for more than one site?

Good posts from Drama 2.0 and Omar Malik on the continuing commoditization of social network solutions. Note that I believe social networking is still a good thing to have -- it's just that it's not a "build it and they will come" solution. You need to have an actual plan on how you will attract & retain users, generate content, monetize your site, etc.

BTW, Drama 2.0's blog is pretty new, but he (she?) has been commenting on TechCrunch for a long time. And his (her?) posts are great, insightful stuff.

Big review on TechCrunch of 34 different white label social networking platforms. It's mostly a comparison chart, but it's still a ton of information. 

One of the nice things about open source is you can build a site/web app quickly with it. But the downside is if you go with the vanilla install and only spend an hour or two customizing it, you don't have much to differentiate yourself from other sites using the same open source product.

For example, I've heard people complain about WordPress (open source blogging platform), saying that the sites you can make with it "all look like WordPress sites." I think that's true if you go with the same themes everyone else does. But with a little effort, your site can look totally unique.

When Mashable ran an article yesterday about Pligg being for sale, Pete Cashmore mentioned that "we get around 3 Pligg-powered sites submitted to Mashable every day." Obviously I don't see 3 Pligg-site reviews each day, so it means that most of them are turned down.

I asked Pete in the comments how he decides which ones (if any) to write about.

Me: Pete, out of curiosity, since there are so many submissions, how do you decide which ones to write about? Are most of the submissions vanilla installs with an hour or two of customization, and thus you write about the ones that are truly novel, or significantly enhanced, or are backed by an actual business/management unit?

Pete: Just answered your own question. ;)

Granted, my question was a bit leading, but I at least wanted some confirmation, correction, and/or elaboration.

10 open source social apps mentioned on Mashable. One I hadn't heard of .. MugShot. Well I heard of MugShot, but didn't know it was open source. ;)

Or at least Pligg.com is for sale.

 

Techcrunch and Mashable posted that Pligg is for sale, mainly because it was too much work for the current Pligg team to keep maintaining the code and community for free.

Pligg is an open source Digg clone that makes it easy to start your own social web site. Pligg has over 60,000 downloads, and many sites use it, but it's not like whomever buys it will sudden get to start charging current Pligg users.

Pligg is currently open source, and I assume that the current version of the source will have to stay that way. If the new owners try to charge money for it, someone will probably fork the current code to keep it free. Instead, the new owner will mainly get the Pligg web site, the forum, the Pligg name, and control of the current sourceforge repository. A good monetizing move might be to offer paid installation, support, and customization for open source software, something I've been doing more of personally at DevelopmentNow.

 

InvestingMinds is a new social network for serious investors. It features all the typical social network elements (friends, forums, groups, chat, IM, blogs, photos, etc.). InvestingMinds also offers a wiki where members can view and edit financial terms and information about their favorite stocks, plus users can create their own stock portfolios. Lastly, the site offers original content in its articles area.

 

 Sk*rt is a new (well, since may 07) social bookmarking site branded as a "Digg for women," allowing users to submit, rate, and comment stories & links in a variety of categories. It definitely has it's own bright, welcoming feel, as opposed to more tech-heavy sites like Digg, Slashdot, etc.

An interesting point is that Sk*rt is powered by Pligg, an open source Digg clone. Leveraging existing software allowed Sk*rt to get up & running very quickly, because instead of writing a lot of software, they could instead configure & rebrand Pligg.

However, Sk*rt has to make their source code available under Pligg's Affero license. They may not need to provide everything they've written, but certainly any modifications to Pligg's codebase would need to be provided, and I wonder if they would also need to open source their Pligg template, design, and any other addons.

Once again we see software as a commodity, and at least for Sk*rt (for now), their competitive advantage isn't their code. Instead it's their design, branding, marketing, content, user base, financials, and management.

After all, if all that mattered were code & features, the slew of Digg & MySpace clones would have already come to the forefront.

Below are some web sites where you can browse cool web designs, get free templates, and/or find a designer.

• Open Source Web Design
• Open Web Design (shares a lot of content w/ OSWD)
• CSS Remix
• faveup
• screenfluent
• webcreme

Good to get ideas on looks, colors, etc.

10 good blog articles. Kudos to Colin C.