Shuzak.com - A niché social network

Everyone on the internet today is part of some social network or the other. Your day would comprise of one of the following activities if you are part of one -

1. Check the front page or your own personal social page to see any new topics or replies.
2. See if anyone has befriended, added you as a contact, joined your community or you sent you a PM.
3. Check the front page again.
4. Comment on a topic, add a favorite to your bookmarks or email somebody about it.
5. See if anyone has commented back to your comments
6. Repeat if necessary

So there you go and believe it or not human beings like doing such kind of things, me included, I don’t really know why but I guess it’s more easier for us to relate with other people after you’ve read their profile or a few posts and comments that they have made.

In real life things hardly work out like that you can’t just walk up to somebody you see in the supermarket and ask to be their friends or join their circle of friends. So anyway that’s going to be another post by itself.

Shuzak.com is a niché social network service where you can join and create your own communities, invite other people to join your community or just simply browse around.

The rating system in the topics are based on users comments instead of the topic itself. Once people rate the comments the user and the whole topic itself gets a boost in ‘karma’ rating. Which is different in a way as the topic relies on the karma of the comments to become popular and not just voting on the topic itself.

The community itself likes to cater to more of the geek variety of humans where object oriented programming is a common phrase and britney spears is not. The future of social networking as we go into 2007 will be decided more or less from this time onwards.

And niche networks such as shuzak stand to gain ground as they cater to a set type of individuals who can easily co relate with each other’s way of talking and be comfortable.

The site is still in beta but popularity seems to be growing as members talk about things they are interested in and at times maybe not as well.

I’ve joined the site to see what it was all about and so far its in ‘beta’, which is fine, but there are a few things that I would like to see is maybe a better navigation system and maybe a working ground for like testing scripts that a member would like to see it in action, share or get feedback to a problem they may have (without giving up source code of course unless its GPL). You know like The Danger Room in the X-Men where all hell breaks loose and you gotta use your skills to save yourself…yeah that would be cool. I haven’t seen that yet anywhere on the web. (hmm…good idea for my next Open Source Idea).

So to sum it up from their press release -

The purpose of Shuzak is to create a community of interesting and informative people; the sort of people who are at the forefront of technological and scientific progress. It is worth noting that our key attractor here is not better technology. If technology is what makes us stand out, then someone somewhere on the World Wide Web is bound to wipe us away simply by introducing better technology. No, our key attractor here is being different, and so far we have done a fairly good job at it. Shuzak is not an alternative for Facebook, Orkut, or Bebo. Our category is neither teens nor students. Our category is geeks.

So check it out for yourself and give it a spin shuzak.

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