Terrible Websites

Only five days after I wrote about how you shouldn't create your own social network, a new social network, mypoliticalworld.com, was brought to my attention.

Now, I normally don't jump to conclusions with these things. I set up an account and check out the site/features and then I make a judgment as to whether or not a site has any utility and/or potential. Unfortunately this time around when I was setting up my account something so glaring really ruined it for me: a political social network misspells the name of the Democratic Presidential nominee.

That's right, users can choose whether they support John McCain or Barrack Obama. Are you frackin' kidding me? You are billing yourself as a social network for politicos. Of all places you would expect such a site to spell Barack Obama's name correctly.

You know what feature they do have? That's right, you guessed it. It tells you the weather of your hometown. Whoopty-friggin'-do. Guess what? I was just outside. I know it is 104 degrees and hotter than hell. What relevance does that really have to a social network about politics? Were they spending time coming up with that feature instead of getting the Democratic Presidential candidate's name right?

In order to be fair I will actually address some of the "features."

You can write your own blog that is then aggregated with the other blog posts people have done. So far it appears that a good chunk of it is just people cross-posting their stuff from their other blogs so that maybe 3 more people will read it.

There is a lackluster jobs board that is just weak compared to the other political job resources out there. Here is a question. Why would a Democratic political operative search through a job list with a bunch of jobs for Republicans when they can just go to a better list with only Democratic and Progressive candidates and organizations and vice versa? The answer: they wouldn't.

There is also no way to find out if people you already know are on the site. There is no contact importer nor can you browse users. Then again, with only 500-something users, odds are none of your friends were gullible enough to sign-up for an account (yes I know the irony here).

Speaking of features, how about the forum that nobody uses? Totally sweet. I love dead forums almost as much as I love the Twitter Fail Whale.

MyPoliticalWorld is also trying to be your homepage by aggregating content through RSS feeds from HuffPo, BBC, etc. Once again, there are so many better options for this.

Look, the site is so friggen' bad that the "two young professionals" who co-founded it are ashamed to step out of anonymity. How can you start a social network where you expect people to reveal their identities and share information about themselves if you, the founders, aren't willing to do the same thing? Having a real person associated with a start-up is textbook. Unfortunately, the anonymous founders apparently lost all their textbooks while they were being very important DC political operatives. It happens, I understand, but most people would read up on this stuff before launching something. Just saying.

You know what the best part of the site is? The Rock the Vote voter registration widget on the home page. You know what is weird about it though? This network is apparently "for politicos." Most of the political operatives I have met and worked with were already registered to vote. I'm not knocking using the widget, it just seems like the best thing about the stupid site isn't relevant to its demographic.

In other words, don't even bother with this site. Seriously. I'm not kidding.

Thanks, or maybe I guess no thanks, to Sarah Burris for bringing this to my attention.