Social Networking – UR Doin It Rong

Sometimes when I am doing field research at work, I stumble upon some items of real curiosity.

Take, for instance, the site MyBookFace.net.  No, I will not be so kind as to link that because I believe this site has ‘fail’ scrawled all over its 60% quality JPGs.  At first glance, it seems this domain is striving to ride on the coattails of its namesakes, MySpace and Facebook, but the only thing it is likely doing is reeling in those that are unfamiliar with social networking.  Even the name is a glaring attempt to obscure social networking for the uninitiated.

Don’t even get me started on the aesthetics and lack thereof. But nice logo. [/sarcasm]

If you’re curious about who exactly are the social networking uninitiated, you can check out the Quantcast data revealing that affluent, educated males over the age of 35, with children, are the target market.

I would peg “parents” as their target suckers, but we all know that mombloggers are some of the most net savvy people in the web. And it isn’t unheard of for business professionals of the target age demographic to head over to LinkedIn, female and male alike.

Essentially, their real target demographics are probably those who are just slightly out of touch — or at least out of touch enough so that they’d butcher the household names of MySpace and/or Facebook and go to this network.

It claims to be the “friendly” alternative to MySpace and Facebook, but really isn’t the gripe we usually have about MySpace and Facebook is that they’re exorbitantly friendly?  They are social networks, after all.

Ok, so maybe mybookface can be friendlier than the two social networking behemoths. I am yet to find evidence to support this, but I’ll give them the benefit if of the doubt.

What I would really like to draw to your attention is the main splash page graphic:

Okay. mybookface is trying to tell us 3 things:

1. Americans move to Paraguay to become detectives.
2. White businessmen who live in the city of Lhasa move to Perth to become Elvis impersonators.
3. Chinese people live in Africa, which is actually true about Angola, but this guy seems to be based in Cameroon.

…

Did anyone *facepalm* yet?

Tags: facebook, fail, mybookface, myspace, social networking, wtf
Filed Under: Internet, Random, Research & Development