Will Piczo Be the Next MySpace?

Piczo CEO Jeremy Verba claims that the Piczo website is "…the biggest social networking site you haven’t heard of yet." He may be right. As of October 2006, Piczo boasted 17 million sites registered by its users (10 million uniques) and 2.5 billion page views per month. (For comparison’s sake, Facebook had 7 million users as of March of this year.) The U.K. import began as a photo-sharing site, but, upon user requests, branched into social networking.

However, what’s different about Piczo is that there is no search feature - adding a friend is on an invite-only basis. As more and more MySpacers clutter up their profile with casual friends & acquaintances, finding the friends you really want to network with becomes a challenge. Additionally, privacy concerns at both MySpace & Facebook (MySpace has sexual predators & Facebook users were in an uproar over the news feed) have many users wanting a more private place to network.

Today, TechCrunch reports that Piczo is growing at a rate of 35,000 new users a day and that they have just made a deal with Flock to distribute a Piczo-branded version of the browser. So, will Piczo be the next MySpace or even the next Facebook? I think it’s possible. As MySpace aged and grew, the teens and early 20’s kids joined Facebook; but where will their kid brothers and sisters choose to hang out? Piczo could be a good bet.

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CNet UK posted an article at the end of November called the "Top 10 Girl Geeks." I hadn’t had a chance to look at it until now, but I heard there was quite an uproar over it…now I know why. It was a great concept for a list, but I question some of the "girls" chosen for the list. I’m not alone in this. Obviously, the article is meant to be tongue-in-cheek to some extent, but I personally found it insulting to have a "girl geek" list that included a cartoon (Lisa Simpson) and the infamous Paris Hilton, whose claim to geekdom includes attending E3 and starring in a video game. What??  If I was writing a girl geek top 10 list, I would include some other entries…like Veronica Belmont and Molly Wood of CNet’s own Buzz Out Loud podcast; Mena Trott, president and co-founder of Six Apart; Caterina Flake, co-founder of flickr; Gina Hughes, the Techie Diva; and, a personal favorite of mine, the SBS Diva (a Small Business Server blogger). Considering the amount of flack over this, I wonder if the article was just a piece of linkbait?

Yahoo has finally figured out what to do with all their acquisitions and Yahoo services — they’re going to do what they do best: build portals. Yahoo has plans to launch over 100 "brand" portals in 2007, the first one being the newly launched Wii portal. On the Wii portal, content from various Yahoo services is mashed up, including photos from flickr, links from del.icio.us & My Web, Q&As from Yahoo Answers, and, of course, links to purchase the Wii on Yahoo Shopping.

With the recent ruckus over Yahoo’s "Peanut Butter Manifesto," you would think that Yahoo needed to get their act together. However, this portal initiative makes it seem as if Yahoo is right on target. (Via Mashable)