Yuku: MySpace Clone?
I'm intrigued. An "Important Announcement" has appeared at the top of ezboard communities that the board administrators can choose to show as they see fit. It reads:
"Important ezAnnouncement: Meet your ezboard friends on Yuku and check out their profiles. You'll be amazed with what you can do with the new Yuku profiles. Click here to get your ezboard account into Yuku now!"
Now unless you've been a regular visitor to the ezboard Help [sic] Forums or your community administrator has been keeping you up to date with developments with Yuku originally leaked out by ezboard, you'd probably be wondering what on earth this is all about.
If you go to ezboard's "Important Announcements" forum, you won't see any announcement as to what Yuku is. Only if you go to your Control Center will you see an image inviting you to migrate to Yuku. Or perhaps, you'd need to know about the ezboard CEO's WordPress Blog. That's not a separate post in "Important Announcements", by the way.
So let's look at this announcement again. No clue as to what Yuku is or that ezboards will all be closed down having been forced to migrate to Yuku. No, it's all about user profiles.
If you take a look at Robert Labatt's Yuku profile page you'll see it's a MySpace clone: take a look at Tom Anderson's MySpace profile. Tom Anderson is MySpace's co-founder.
Note that Yuku has copied MySpace in that new registrants to MySpace have Tom added to their friends and as I reported here, Yuku does the same with Labatt and up to nine others. Of course, that's where the comparison ends. Whilst Tom has, at the time of writing, 92,950,935 friends, Rob can only muster 2,282...
So it's clear the direction Yuku is headed. After seeing how well MySpace has done since it started in 2003, ezboard wants a piece of that action by trying to reinvent itself as a MySpace clone. Three years too late...
Maybe that's why the Yuku development emphasis was all about profile pages first, sub-domains next and now finally on message boards?
