Distraction of the day: Tribe.net; it's a social-software thing, a bit like Friendster, only it's actually useful for things other than dating. It's a bit like the late lamented sixdegrees.com (now replaced by a commercial dating site which seems to have bought the original logo at a dot-com bankrupcy auction, but I digress), and has "tribes" (or interest groups) you can join (or create), as well as forums and listings.

Posted by: Ben | http://leviathan.weblogs.com | Thu Jul 31 14:26:36 2003

So you weren't interested in a date then :-(

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Thu Jul 31 14:46:52 2003

Sorry, Ben, but you're not really my type.

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Thu Jul 31 14:53:46 2003

Seriously, Friendster's model falls down because the networks are only really useful for one application, i.e., dating. Which means that people not interested in dating are less likely to join, and networks are a lot sparser and there are fewer people you can find through them. Tribe, however, has multiple uses (dating, organising events, selling stuff, discussion, &c.), which encourages more people to join and makes each application more useful in itself.

Posted by: Ben | http://leviathan.weblogs.com | Thu Jul 31 20:04:48 2003

Is it connected to that whole Tribe dot-bomb thing? The one which was (supposed to be) sort of an inverted, hip version of citysearch for people who want to go to raves and have sex and stuff?

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Fri Aug 1 02:42:00 2003

No; this is a San Francisco outfit; the other one was Australian.

Posted by: Ben | http://leviathan.weblogs.com | Fri Aug 1 04:56:59 2003

San Francisco eh? Hmmm, watch out for the sort of 'friends' you might attract. Still, the Pope might be going to shut them down soon. Let us Pray.

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