Xuqa has made not only a great site themselves, but also spurred other sites to add new features to try and keep up.

Kudos to you guys!!

TechCrunch has a post that touches XuQa’s monetization strategy. The social networking site has developed a mini-economy centered on earning peanuts. One way that users can earn peanuts is to complete CPA offers. They must be doing pretty well …

About those numbers, most major investment banking research divisions do cover many tech start-ups’ fundamental studies, please request one of those if you know anyone there, they usually have pdf versions for internal distribution. Although these resarch reports tend to be conservative, but they speak with numbers and fundamental information, of course numbers can tell everything, but at least they are relatively more objective that guessing and rumors. But anyhow, these reports usually serve as information analysis other than a recommendation or conclusion, so it is up to you how to interpret these numbers. After all, many of those start-ups could be their potential clients for IPO and M&A, investment banks do need to know as much as possible who they are dealing with.

It is, however, not my intent to criticize XuQa here. Many young SNS start-ups are gone already. XuQa is still alive, that alone shows it has potential. Just after all the early SNS mania, remaining smart players should learn that there is still a long way to go before their early start-ups can become mature and sustainable companies. Hope XuQa will be one of them eventually.

Early in March U.W.A staff received a number of complaints about material being posted on the XuQa web site. On examination it was found that a number of postings were personal attacks on members of U.W.A, and that even though they were posted anonymously they will have been written by other members of U.W.A.

It was clear that a number of these items were defamatory. The data network at U.W.A is connected to the Internet via the UK Universities JANET network, and continuing to allow its transmission to Aberystwyth would have constituted a breach of the JANET Acceptable Use policy the University have signed up to. As such access to XuQa was blocked on 9th March.

Shortly after this, XuQa contacted Information Services to say that they agreed there were problems with the site and that they were taking steps to rectify this. On 23rd March they supplied U.W.A with Moderator Guidelines that they were distributing, and confirmed that they had appointed a number of local moderators.

However, evidence presented by members of UWA since that time clearly shows that defamatory material remains available and that, if the site is unblocked, further highly offensive material is immediately posted. As such UWA currently contemplates no change in policy, and do not expect to be reviewing the matter again in the near future. This issue has taken considerable staff time – time which would be better spent in providing robust networking for academic purposes.

The material on this page was last reviewed on 27th March 2006
The page is maintained by Jeremy Perkins.

was just checking my email and was surprised to find this sitting in my spam folder:

Hello,
Somebody on XuQa.com has added you to their crush list.
Click on the link to learn more.
XuQa.com/joinit

Cheers,
The XuQa.com Team

If you do not want to get any further emails, follow this link:
XuQa.com/unsubscribe.php?go=7cb0726f

XuQa.com -
1 (413) 884-1046
feedback@XuQa.com
88 Linden St. Williamstown, MA 01267
http://www.XuQa.com

I thought “hmmm,” I’d better check this out! So I did, only to discover that to find out “who” has a “crush” on my I would have to enter all my friends’ email addresses that I “have a crush” on and hope for a match:

How do I find out who my Secret Admirer is? Well if we simply told you, he or she wouldn’t be secret anymore (hint: common friends between you & your secret admirer are listed. going to each of your common friends profiles is a good way to start investigating)

What this is is not a viable way for people to connect, but an exponential disruptive mouth-to-mouth promotional scheme. If you can get people to keep referring all of their friends, you’ll soon have enough members to compete with the Facebook! Which leads me to the following theory:

In order to get mega-membership, why not send out crushlist invitations to everyone at Cornell? After all, unless all of them enter every other cornell student’s email address, they’ll never know that no one at Cornell actually sent a crush to them.

In other words, I don’t really trust XuQa. To take this even further, I have the suspicion that they’re harvesting data from TheFaceBook.com and using it to pre-populate their databases, as evidenced by the long lists of blank names of Cornell Students who all signed up on “Wednesday, Sep 21:”

much more.

…unless you have 10 million peanuts.

re this previous comment, you should get over it. i look at the websites, i write about what I think is interesting, then commenters complain and some one else sells the ads. besides, i said it was creepy!