A European company called Webjam launches this weekend at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. It is a personal Web aggregation tool with a heavy social networking component.
At first, I thought Webjam was like a fancier Spokeo in that it allows you to customize your profile page with RSS feeds and your personal content from sites like Flickr. On both sites users can share their pages within their network but Webjam takes that function one step further. With Webjam, users can replicate other pages they find within the Webjam network. They can create a new page with someone else’s content and change it however they like.
For example, imagine you find a Webjam page promoting an upcoming movie. You decide you want to share it with your friends but think some of the content is offensive or lame or for some reason not worthy of sharing. If the page is public, you can duplicate that page and now the page becomes yours to change however you want. You can change the color, the layout, the content. You can add movie reviews from another site. It is a new page under your Webjam account with a new URL.
If you create a site you don’t want anyone to edit or duplicate, you can set it as private but Webjam thinks that most people will keep their pages public. After all, imitation is the best form of flattery.
For private use, Webjam is useful if you want to set your homepage to feed various social components such as your sister’s Flickr album or your friend’s recommended Web pages of the day in addition to the standard home page elements. You can easily duplicate those elements of others’ pages into your own home page. As soon as you push Edit, each component of the page becomes a module, or a widget, editable by drag and drop. The only component that is not movable or deletable is, of course, the advertising module.
The pages within Webjam are organized by tags. The founders said that they anticipate people will start to build communities within each tag.
“It’s very powerful because it’s bringing the power of communicating to the next level,” said Yann Motte, co-founder and managing director of Webjam. “Sharing is fine, but so what? We will make people better by allowing them to build on the communities of what Webjam is doing. If you have no clue on how to run a Web site, you can go to Webjam, pick one you like, and just replicated it.”
I didn’t find Webjam to be the easiest site to learn. There are so many tools and functions, which is not a bad thing but it did take longer than most social networking sites to figure out. But the tutorial is well written.
Webjam unofficially launched a week ago but they wouldn’t tell me how many users they’ve had sign up so far. “We want to keep that information to ourselves but we will say that we did not expect to see this many users from the beginning,” Motte said. The company is in the process of completing its first round of funding.
A video tour is below:
Seems pretty neat-o!
Interesting site! Thanks for sharing. Love your blog layout. Enjoy the weekend!
*CHEERS*
I know this is off topic. Dr. Yunus is accepting the nobel peace prize on the 10th and Grameen Foundation has setup a blog to feature it. Come check it out http://blog.grameenfoundation.org
wejam doesn’t seem to work with Safari. It seemed ok in Firefox. The tools are somewhat buggy right now. I dragged some modules around and “lost” them. The labels for the commands and are also a bit confusing “Cancel Edit” & “Edit” for e.g. What’s up with that? Please stick to conventions like “Edit”, “Cancel” etc. Also there were just way too many controls. It would be much better to have a simple interface and then some “advanced” tools for the hackers of the world
Well, good luck to them… So now NetVibes users will create a profile there, WebJam will report a growth in users and get funded… Then a new service starts and WebJam & NetVibes users register there too - so they get funded as well… Of course, none of them have any revenue - it’s just a big ponzi scheme.
There is no stickiness in this idea and have a look at the UI - it’s certainly targetting only geeks. They better get their Excel working and try to get funded fast.
Interesting concept, but content-jam style makes this confusing….
I’m sorry… but I don’t understand anything… Natali, maybe you have a bad day or I have.
Why should I copy a website that promotes a movie… what’s the big plan behind it… so many buttons, does any one really think that this kind of hyperventilating interface goes mainstream.
If I want to grab stuff and put it in a drag & drop environment I use myholycrib.com - one button, one click - done. And what about that super-highspeed tutorial video, still feeling dizzy. Slow it down to normal speed and it will take 10 minutes… and seems to explain only the basic features.
Sorry guys, I really appriciate fresh ideas but this one is far too chaotic for my taste.
Check out http://www.yourminis.com - similar concept but easier to use with more modules….we also offer a community to see publish tabs, rate, search and add to your own dashboards….
Community is at http://dir.yourminis.com
Webjam reminds me of Ning, with more social network flavor.
Spokeo is just an aggregator. Natali is right. Spokeo does not allow you to build a profile or edit CSS because it’s not a social network.
This strict product definition allows Spokeo to focus on organizing vast amounts of social content. For example, only Spokeo allows you to start tracking hundreds of friends’ blogs in ONE click. It’s this simplicity that makes Spokeo different.
I like how they misspelled their own name in their youtube video tour… at least it is misspelled at the moment.
Thanks for the review Natali & TechCrunch!
In response to some of the comments:
Re: Safari - yep indeed it’s not completely working in Safari. There’s some pretty complex Javascript in there and Safari’s handling of it isn’t quite up to Firefox’s levels. It’s something we’re working on over the next few weeks.
Re: Complexity of the interface - Webjam is a very powerful product and there are many functionalities. We are constantly working to improve the user experience and are very keen to react quickly to user feedback on the issue.
Re: misspelling of our own name on the tutorial video - It was late, we were in a rush!
We’ll correct this soon. Ahem,…
Marcus
(co-founder, Webjam)
Has anyone noticed techcrunch.com is getting links from pornotube. wtf?
nice article by the way. love reading ur blog.
i think i noticed a week ago #12…but anyway i must say “not another social networking site” but nevertheless a little different than the rest needs to be more “user friendly” and I will give it a thumbs up
There are some nice tools and technology in use here but the whole idea of “copying a site, giving it a name and then claiming it as your own” seems like a sure-fire way to get yourself sued for copyright infringement. I think VC money would avoid this like the plague.
Mmmm…Interesting, but seems like the whole content sharing thing will just result in a lot of duplicate content.
Poor home page. The video is interesting if they get people to watch it. Otherwise, there is no quick and easy explanation of what Webjam is. Confusing. Needs a re-design — quickly.
Thank you Natali for your review and to Techcrunch readers for your comments.
Webjam is often compared to an elegant blend between social networking, blogging/publishing and personalized pages. As a combination of the three, our interface is indeed unsettling because more simple: with just a few buttons on the topbar you can manage all aspects of both sites (modules, content and styles…) and communities (invites, co-editing rights…) management without ever leaving your page for separate admin tools. Furthermore you can constantly toggle between a view and an edit mode to check how each site and its individual modules will be seen by you, your communities and the public. Our aim is to raise the bar for web publishing and sharing; we know we have to work on making this even easier for you, and your comments are invaluable in that regard. We are going to organize focus groups in different cities starting by the UK and the US after the Christmas period. Contact us at contact@webjam-ltd.com if you are interested.
On replication, our belief is that things should indeed be replicable by default -in a Creative Commons sort of spirit- to allow everybody to simply be better at what they do by building on, not merely copying, what the community is doing. Of course not everything can and should be replicable. That is why most of the content you post is indeed not, like blogs and forums, and it is the publisher’s decision to share or not the bookmarks or map markers they have contributed to the community for example. On the other hand, the architecture of each page, its layout, its style and the modules always are replicable at this stage. Advertising modules, like any other, can be moved around and edited to change their format on all community/public pages, but they don’t appear on any private page unless you request it.
We are working among other things on releasing (premium) replication functionalities that will allow publishers to fine-tune who can replicate or edit what among content, modules, layout and styles. If you are interested to be part of the thinking regarding how Webjam should evolve, go to http://about.webjam.com/wj/discusswebjam/
Finally hardly two weeks after the launch, we are seeing growth across very different type of usage: casual blogging around interest and passions, community management (eg local clubs…), professional use to share industry/project information with selected colleagues, and corporate use to aggregate extra/intranet tools and information for partners and colleagues alike to foster “viral” efficiency, if not build an entire website like we have done! See how Webjam can help you manage your digital life on http://about.webjam.com/wj/whywebjam/
Webjam is indeed about sharing! Replicate- or rather build on- what you like, and more importantly make replicable what can enhance the lives of your chosen communities or the general public. Webjam, simply be better.
Yann Motte, CEO
RSS our blog on http://about.webjam.com/wj/blog/ to know the latest ; like yours on your Webjam pages, it is readable outside the registration-only environment we keep for the beta period until we make all public pages available to all in just a few weeks.
Sorry, don’t like this site.
http://www.ezecho.com
Content repurpose is very popular these days. I think it is fine as long as it is RSS dynication under CC license.
Here is another nice startup/venture news syndication site called discoverion http://www.discoverion.com. Not sure where it is going, but pretty cool