I am not trying to contend that Facebook is superior to anything in any way. While it’s a highly useful tool, it’s had its problems, and it still lacks some basic features (which would make it more useful but less of an addiction, which is supposedly bad for business). But while that may be a wonderful topic for another day, today I’d like to focus on why classmates.com is so much worse than facebook.com.

Some years ago, when classmates.com first came into existence, I’d like to think that it was one of the first splogs I’ve ever seen. It was impossible to surf the web for more than five minutes before walking into one of their annoying advertisements. And no, they weren’t the calm, serene, 200×200px adsense boxes. They were huge banners, oftentimes popups or interstatial popunders. I think I actually had a windows service running that was specifically devoted to blocking their ads. Not to say that I haven’t signed up for an account. The idea was good and I was in high school at the time. It all would have been wonderful, except that a) the website never got any major traction, and b) I think it became so synonymous with spam that the very idea of using it as a service caused an involuntary acid reflux.

Well, I’ve been away for almost a week, stuck on an unexpected contract. I must say that non-disclosure agreements are not as fun as they sound, especially for a blogger who’s just dying to share something this interesting. On signing the contract and the agreement I was subjugated to an IQ test, and while I have much less confidence in them than I used to years ago, I was happy to score 138. So was the client.

Let’s see. In that same week I managed to almost get sued by Beyonce Knowles’ lawyers, I lost a fair bit of my online portfolio due to sheer stupidity (for the first time ever I tried to play it safe – bad idea), I came down with an overdue illness, I got ideas for 200+ domains and some 10 sites, and wrote a research paper on why technology serves as empirical proof to the concept of Post-Modernism. At the same time I’ve ignored e-mail and my blog almost completely.

Today I got my invite to try out minggl.com. First, a brief description from their own site: “MiNGGL is a free, simple, and easy-to-use browser plugin that helps you connect with friends and manage your profile, whether you’re a member of one or multiple social networking sites. With the MiNGGL Social Palette, your friends and favorite social spots will be connected into a larger network that you control.”
Sounds good, right? Aggregators are becoming popular nowadays, which is the natural step in the world of post-myspace and post-facebook startups that hope to claim a piece of the socnetverse.^[1] Minggl’s potential uniqueness in this paradigm is that it does not simply aggregate data using rss, opml or api on their own site – instead they provide a browser toolbar / plugin that allows their own Minggl notes to be added directly to the site in question (so far myspace and facebook). A little note shows up in the white-space surrounding the facebook / myspace profile that sums up your relationship to the person, and if the person also happens to be a minggl user, more of these floating boxes will appear throughout the profile, nicely embedded wherever the user decided to add one of these notes.
But instead of talking, let me show you what I mean. The setup process is a breeze – in my case I used FireFox 2.0. The toolbar installed just like a standard plugin would (although at 600 kb+ it is rather large for FireFox). After the installation, this is the page you see:

Right off the bat I should admit that I don’t particularly like their choice of domain. It’s not catchy, it’s not a type-in domain, and it does not seem very relevant to their market. I hope I’m not wrong on this and that their SEO guys will try to make up for it, but it’s a gut feeling I can’t seem to shake off.

Ugenie.com serves a dual purpose. On one hand it’s a tool to search for bargains; on the other it tries to present the user with potential bundles to get instead of just an individual product. Its first purpose sounds secondary, since there are many sites who already do this – so we’re led to believe that its real focus are bundles and being able to save is just a natural extension of that service.

Frankly, I believe that that’s how all of the web 2.0 world should be categorized – into good mashups (slick and useful), bad mashups (eyecandy, but no value) and ugly (useful, but lacking in design). Here’s an example of three recent offerings which exemplify these categories.

klostu.com – one of the smartest recent start-ups, aiming to aggregate anything and everything to do with web forums – your presence, multiple identities across multiple forums, tracking friends’ activities, new posts and threads, etc. Wonderful idea, if only because they were the first to think about it and while we already have a number of early-stage social networking / RSS aggregators, forums are a large part of the net and they definitely deserve their own tracking engine. Judging by klostu’s blog, they still have quite a bit of features up their sleeve, so keep an eye out here. And whereas I am not convinced about their choice of a color-scheme, the website is definitely good looking by almost all Ajax standards. Clean, crisp, fast – thus easily falling into the good category.