Zaadz: Social Networking With a Conscience

Social networking sites make a lot of promises as far as creating a community of users, but so far it seems as if the popular ones are nothing more than a way to see how many “friends” you’re connected to with no real payback. Great, so I’ve got all these friends. Now what? If you have a band to promote, MySpace probably works for you. I know I get 5-10 invites from bands every week wanting me to be their friend. Great for the band, doesn’t do much for me though.

Recently I was invited to be a member of Zaadz, a new social networking site with a focus on working together to make the world a better place. If Al Gore was going to start a social networking site, this would be the one. Whether you’re interested in the greening of your neighborhood or finding your inner Zen, there is likely a ‘pod’ for you on Zaadz to join. The goal of Zaadz is to “...build THE most inspired community of people in the world… Imagine social networking with a purpose, a community of seekers and conscious entrepreneurs circulating wisdom and inspiration and wealth and all that good stuff. Fun fun fun.” In the short time I’ve been a member, I can already see the people here are much more interested in cultivating a community where discussion and learning are key and the status of how many friends you have is far less important.

Zaadz has most of the features you’d expect like photo galleries, blogging, discussions, and profiles. You can make suggestions for features, as well as see what they are working on adding. A lot of the suggestions are for features that they are likely already doing elsewhere. This is what I don’t quite understand about the newer social sites (well most of them actually), rather than build in a lot of these features why not leverage available API’s from sites like Flickr and del.icio.us. If I already manage a collection of photos at Flickr, I don’t really want to manage another set someplace else. If I’m already blogging with a tool that could let me cross-post, why not take advantage of that.

The biggest problem we’re going to face soon is people will have too many places to keep track of the same information. Chances are the photos I put on any site are going to be the same, don’t make me keep uploading and arranging new galleries. Ask me for my Flickr or photobucket account and let me grab photos from there. There is value in creating sites with unique features but a photo gallery is a photo gallery no matter where you put it. Rather than rebuild the wheel, concentrate your efforts on the parts of your site that make it unique.

Zaadz has a great collection of quotes for inspiration but, at this point, you can’t do anything with them other than view them. I’d love to see them add the features to let people tag, sort, and do whatever else people might want to do with quotes (like let me somehow display my favorites on my WordPress blog for example). I think the first site that figures out how to integrate with as many other service-based sites as possible and still create a community feeling will have the best chance at stealing users from MySpace.

If you’re looking for a different type of social networking than you’ve found so far, Zaadz could give you the feeling that time spent there is worth it.