Loopster is Useless

If you can’t beat them, aggregate them! Loopster.com is a new social networking website that helps you manage all of your social networking website accounts. Here is excerpt from their website,

Loopster was founded on the idea that managing relationships online is often a tedious chore. Back when your friends were defined by the people you see every day we never had to worry about this. If something happened in someone’s life they told you. Now that social networking has moved to the internet a hole has developed because people are choosing to just put that information online in a number of different places most often with no indication that anything has happened. With the number of places a person can go to maintain their information increasing every passing month, the number of places we each need to go to keep up with the pulse of our social groups is rapidly increasing. Here at Loopster we our aim is to make it easier to know when something is happening in the lives of people you care about.

Well, I gave the website a whirl this evening and found it utterly useless for the following reasons:

• Even though I am a member of many social networking sites, I only care about one or two of them. How much value is this website adding to me when I only have two of them. Plus, those two social networking sites already have features to quickly check on the update history of folks you’re connected to.
• Not enough features. If you’re going to aggregate my contacts from multiple networks, at least show me some interesting cross network information.
• Performance Blows. The fetching of contacts seemed to take forever. It was long enough that I just stopped importing from some of the accounts.

Hopefully, the website will get better. Or, its just part of a long line of stupid web 2.0 companies and will just go away. It’s a coin flip. Either way, I’m sure they got a bunch of VC money to figure it out.

God, I need to stop writing about these social networking sites. Next post, the thrilling side of enterprise software!