Let’s add one more new social network to the list that’s trying to woo college students back from Facebook: Lymabean. It hasn’t launched yet, but you can watch an overview video of what appears to be a very pretty Flash-based interface.
The site has most of the bells and whistles required of social networks today - profiles, friends, photos, videos, etc. Instant messaging is also built in and integrated with most of the features (drag and drop a photo into IM, for example). Lymabean also has professor ratings, class notes, and other features.
They say they’ll launch at University of Arizona and Arizona State University first. Since Facebook has a largely unchallengeable stranglehold on college student page views, I don’t see this going too far (Flash social networks never do anyway). But it makes for an excellent resume for the founders.
The Lymabean blog is here.
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Damn, I was watching the video until a picture of a six-pack guy called Roger Johnson popped up on my screen an a member of accounts behind me sneaking a peak at what I was doing simply raised an eye-brow! Thanks! NOT.
“But it makes for an excellent resume for the founders.”
HOW??
Wow..check this out. Try and do a View Source on any blog page, you will see a ton of links to Spam. Very suspicious what these guys are up to. All the spam link are apparently located on the header section.
@3 It’s not suspicious really, at least I don’t think they have done anything with intent. There is a known exploit going around that is doing this to venerable WP installations and some other blogging software. I would just e-mail them and let them know about it, if you can be bothered — I can’t, it’s almost home time.
I’m one of the Lymabean guys… thanks for the heads up about the spam in the blog code. Wordpress has been having all sorts of problems with security lately.
Feel free to shoot me any other comments… roger@lymabean.com. Thanks!
Aren’t all the *future* of websites Flash based?
Can anyone imagine it not being so?
This would look great on resume, as making a Flash SN is impressive. Though I don’t know how many more SNs can people take. Every site now wants to have one. Soon IRS will have one too. And you’ll have to open an account there!
I too am sick of facebook, and turned down 13 application requests yesterday. But I have 300 some odd pictures uploaded, double that if you count those uploaded by my friends, and I don’t feel like filling out another full profile.
Can you scrape facebook to get all my info to your site? Switching would be so frekin time consuming. For whoever figures it out rock on, and please don’t allow third party application requests to be continuously sent to people.
The problem is not that there are too many SN’s . Any new SN just has to be very original .
There is no point trying to compete with very established SN’s . That is a guaranteed way to fail especially if there is no real incentive to move from your membership in a comfortable SN . If you cant move with all your friends and photos etc . What will be the point of moving ?
Your better off trying something original in a Niche .
This looks pretty cool. I’m pretty tired of all the facebook applications that are pointless and fill up my page with unnecessary crap.
Can’t wait to see it in the UC system!
Flash? boo.
We have the video hosted on-site instead of at the production environment, and it’s a little over-loaded at the moment - if the video won’t load, check back a little later. We’re pushing it out to the bigger servers as we speak.
And thanks for the thoughts… we’re finding college students to be less and less enamored with Facebook as it gets less and less exclusive.
It must worth creating a new SN site, otherwise these guys wouldn’t do so. Yes, a new one is born every day, but the market is huge, too. There are about one billion active internet users (or more) who one can plan for, and achieving some (ten)thousand users is a real goal and it can make a profit.
Who knows, it comes down to creativity now-a-days when getting users. Let’s see how good these guy’s networking skills are!
Yap looks really pretty
so this must be the stealth social network that was plastering flyers around Arizona campus’s looking for beta users.
And we all thought it was Google…
Website is extensively slow, can’t even get the video up *close*
All right… the video’s in the production environment now, so there shouldn’t be any more bandwidth problems. Quite the surprise for a Monday morning, but we’re good to go now.
Seems like Lymabean’s been smoking Looking Glass, Sun is shining weather is fine…
Finnaly got to see the video now that its on the new server .
I like it .
I hope it takes off
You may have to woo people with thousands of friends over 1st and your gonna need an importer .
I am acutally impressed with the site. Hopefully it gains some traction roger
I doubt this will gain any significant traction, but a very well put together site.
Flash is where it’s at*
+ Where it’s going WEB3D.0*
There are sites and tools now such as OpenID( that Google purchase) that allow you to use all your info from other SN sites across multiple sites. Also TC reviewed a site that logs you into all HTML sites at once and you can flip tabs between them - however, a browser tabbed expereince can do the same
Saw the video. I’m very impressed. There is a lot of detail there. I hope you guys do well. I can tell a lot of hard work and talent went into that site.
Its amusing that so many web properties are pulling students away from their studies . Will they ever find time to do their projects. I found this blog by a school teacher who is trying to put web 2.0 for a good use. Read this http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2.....-resource/ . Here is pushing students to use http://www.postalz.com , which he finds “….This is the sort of application that engages me. It may just engage some of your students who are otherwise less engaged than you’d like….”
@#6. Joseph
Quote: “Aren’t all the *future* of websites Flash based?
Can anyone imagine it not being so?”
The future of websites is NOT flash.
JavaScript and AJAX is an amazing amazing thing.
If you have doubts as to whether or not it can replace flash, look no further than this amazing implementation of Solitaire done 100% flash free: http://worldofsolitaire.com
Wow. It’s so beautiful! I love Flash. I mean, what’s not to like?
It’s slow, has sketchy Linux support (but improved since Adobe acquired Macromedia), violates all of the rules of good UI design, makes text often impossible to highlight, makes it very difficult to copy/save images, takes a long time to load, can’t be printed without a specific print function, and best of all, it’s proprietary! Need I go on?
Flash is cool for animation and video, but websites? No thanks.
God help us if Flash is the future.
I think this site is flex. It’s definitely not the future just look at what mtv did with overdrive( crash and burn flash..now if it was flex, different story) and then scaled back to their huge text/big button css site ….but its a good fit for data driven or engaging experience sites…i.e. social networking where you get lost for hours at a time. i dont get the ajax/java comments - flex and ajax are essentially the same - same spidering issues, same user experience - just a bit unique in the way they are coded with actionscript. really, flex vs ajax why not choose flex with all the unique skinning tools …java is the core of AS , esp AS3 for Flex 3… seems like the group building this may not know exactly what they have if they aren’t promoting it as flex - that in itself is more amazing than any flash application - making flex look like this is kewl -
re post number 4 - will be good on the tech teams resume because it looks mad difficult to build this beast - more of a brand microsite in my opinion - let them chop up the functionality and use it
if you are smart you would send this thing oversees…. more advanced users, more users, more users, more users ( get the point) - china just surpassed us - if this puppy is flash or flex, you can readily swap the language - they love Sn over there - facebook is a blip on their network and the big SN’s over there -
It is Flex. We haven’t made a big deal about it so far since we’ve talked mostly to college students - and the user experience doesn’t differ much between Flash and Flex if you don’t know anything about it.
It’s been quite the experience, since it’s taking design to a lot further lengths than Flex has really been taken before.
Hey I am a lymabeaner and I have been on for months. It is an awesome website and these guys are legit. You can actually talk to Doug Bean!!! It is so cool. I really think this is where networking is heading
some people. (gjc) . need to stop talking about this bean. its cool. we get it already… whoo.hoo.