The Great Vertical Social Network Shootout

I don't know about the rest of youse guys, but I'm beginning to feel slightly awash in a sea of social networks. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for vertical social networking and I see it as one of the logical developments of the MySpace revolution.

Lately, us Israeli Internet aficionados have found ourselves spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing a social network of our very own.
First into the fray was The Marker Cafe, an online spot where tech-savvy Israeli business types could get together. A couple of months after that, the iDrink guys rolled out their site, which serves as an online complement to the real-world Internet drinking club.

Now, our friends from The Coils have brought out the.co.ils Zone, which also provides an online space for Israeli Internet entrepreneurs (as well as us investor types) to meet, talk, do business, put up photos, share links, and all that other fun social networking stuff.

Hovering above this all, of course, is Facebook which has seen an incredibly quick uptake of Israeli Internet scenesters, and which already contains an iDrink group, a co.ils group, and numerous other groups related to the Israeli Internet.

So, the question now becomes what to do with all this activity. And frankly, I'm kind of stumped. iDrink is nice, but is limited in its functionality. The Marker Cafe has plenty of functionality. It is, however, in Hebrew only which cuts it off from the rest of the world.

The co.ils Zone looks like it has a lot of potential (assuming that Ning, the platform on which the Zone is built, gets their act together and deals with its recent outages). But it will be a challenge for them to get a critical mass of people actually using the site, what with all the competition from the other sites.

What do you think?

Comments

[Maayan Porat]

Vertical social networks are getting more and more attention indeed and it's interesting to see how things develop.

Ning - there is a great post by Marc Andreessen about Ning. Marc is Ning's founder and was also one of Netscape founders.

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/why-ning.html

BTW - Marc's blog is new and very well worth reading! It include great posts. Recommended.

[Roi Carthy]

Shai,

I couldn't figure it out either... Then Scoble made it clear...

I wrote about it yesterday, here: http://www.roicarthy.com/2007/07/15/social-networks-i-am-media/

R.

[Gideon]

Who has time for all that? My vote is for Facebook only.

[Adrian]

Zone is good because it has a collaborative blog and is viral in the sense whereby to read a post you need to be a member. I've closed down LPI for now with no plans to open it again, at least in the near-term. Contact me for further details/ideas/contributions. Cheers.