Facebook wasn’t built in a day.
Neither will WT:Social, the upstart “news-focused social network” that no-one would ever notice, except that Wikipidia founder Jimmy Wales is behind it. And Wikipedia is a fairly successful project … it’s ranked ninth in global internet engagement according to Alexa.
So it’s getting some attention.
That attention might be a bit early, however. I’m one of the first 200,000 users of the site, and not much is happening yet at WT:Social. Not a lot of news, and not a lot of social.
I already have 53 friends, but I’m not sure how they became my friends. And I’m following 55 people (again, not quite sure how that happened).
Updating my account header photo took three tries, and the second time it become some random person’s me-with-my-muscle-car pic. My feed includes “10 Strange Ways To Get Locked Up In The USA” and “Fighting Misinformation/Fake News: A Historical Perspective.”
So yes, it’s a little weird right now.
One friend, analyst and thought leader Jeremiah Owyang, bought a paid membership for $12.99 to skip the WT:Social waiting line. (WT:Social will not have paid ads, but will rely on donations and subscriptions, like Wikipedia, in an attempt to avoid the issues that Facebook has platformized (fake news, paid fake ads, and election engineering).
Another friend skipped the waiting list instantly without paying, while one sat in the list for three days. Personally, I was offered the opportunity to contribute yesterday, declined, was put in a waiting list, and then magically today made it in.
Perhaps not shockingly, WT:Social looks very much like a wiki.
There’s a list of subwikis (think Groups in Facebook) to join, a place to post something, a social/news feed, a list of wikis you decide to follow upon joining. Oh, and a widget to invite more people.
I can’t say it’s visually appealing, and not all functionality works.
More than anything else, it feels like a socialized news network – kind of a low-volume Twitter – which makes sense, given Wales’ focus on news.
It’s interesting to establish a social network with a similar ethos as Wikipedia, but there’s a lot of work to be done. There’s not much news available yet, and there’s not much social happening. There’s no obvious private messaging capability, and the interface is designed pretty much to share links first.
There’s also the somewhat confusing opportunity, familiar to those of us who are Wikipedia editors, to add an “edit summary” or to “briefly describe your changes” to your social updates.
Sill, there’s potential here.
Wikipedia grew from a dream to an experiment to a global phenomenon. If Jimmy Wales can repeat the trick, we might get some real competition in social media. Don’t hold your breath waiting for your parents to join, however. WT:Social will likely never be that kind of social network.
If you want to join me in this experiment, here I am on WT:Social.
