Tag, You’re It on Consumating
June 9th, 2006
Consumating, which is part of CNet, has recently relaunched with a fresh new design and attitude. Consumating’s users are mostly young workers in their 20’s and 30’s who probably scoff at networks like MySpace. Right now, the emphasis is on social networking, with some shades of dating.
There a few features that sets Consumating apart from the crowd. First, users are able to tag other users. From what I’ve seen, tagging is used pretty creatively, from tags like “brings_the_devil_out” to “physicists_can_be_quarky”. Of course, you can also tag yourself with your own set of tags. Consumating is successfully bringing tags into the social networking world, just like Flickr did in the online photo world.
But, what would a social network be without the aspect of popularity? Consumating allows you to rate users with a thumbs up or down, which goes into a point-based calculation for that particular user. You can see who the most popular users are on the Popularity Leaderboard. What’s interesting is that you can also sort popularity by tags, which allows you to focus in on a particular set of users that might have similar interests as you (as deemed by the user, and the other users who have tagged him or her).
Consumating also does a good job of prodding their users to be creative. They run interesting weekly questions that are posed to all the users. If a user answers the question, it shows up in their discussion (which is kind of like a blog for a user’s stream of messages). This continually generates interesting content that can be funny, witty, or just weird. It’s really a great way to create a sense of community. Some other features include polls and contests, all of which make for interesting user generated content.
Even though the site design is a little cluttered, I think Consumating has a great chance to break into the social networking space, especially for the age group they’re targeting. They’re doing a lot of great content related things that would bring back users for more, and, at the same time, allowing users to discover other user’s who have something in common with them.
Consumating, which is part of CNet, has recently relaunched with a fresh new design and attitude. Consumating’s users are mostly young workers in their 20’s and 30’s who probably scoff at networks like MySpace. Right now, the emphasis is on social networking, with some shades of dating.
There a few features that sets Consumating apart from the crowd. First, users are able to tag other users. From what I’ve seen, tagging is used pretty creatively, from tags like “brings_the_devil_out” to “physicists_can_be_quarky”. Of course, you can also tag yourself with your own set of tags. Consumating is successfully bringing tags into the social networking world, just like Flickr did in the online photo world.
But, what would a social network be without the aspect of popularity? Consumating allows you to rate users with a thumbs up or down, which goes into a point-based calculation for that particular user. You can see who the most popular users are on the Popularity Leaderboard. What’s interesting is that you can also sort popularity by tags, which allows you to focus in on a particular set of users that might have similar interests as you (as deemed by the user, and the other users who have tagged him or her).
Consumating also does a good job of prodding their users to be creative. They run interesting weekly questions that are posed to all the users. If a user answers the question, it shows up in their discussion (which is kind of like a blog for a user’s stream of messages). This continually generates interesting content that can be funny, witty, or just weird. It’s really a great way to create a sense of community. Some other features include polls and contests, all of which make for interesting user generated content.
Even though the site design is a little cluttered, I think Consumating has a great chance to break into the social networking space, especially for the age group they’re targeting. They’re doing a lot of great content related things that would bring back users for more, and, at the same time, allowing users to discover other user’s who have something in common with them.
