Blueworld revamp

I never thought I would see myself writing this (or even saying this) but I felt like an old fart wandering around Blueworld the last day or so. Charl asked me to take a look around after an update so I created an account (easy enough) and started poking around.

The first thing that strikes me is that Blueworld is a bit of a mashup of MySpace, Facebook and JHBLive (there is even an hint of Orkut). It is a social networking site that allows you to create a personal profile, check out events and just generally what your friends have been up to. Profiles have the usual categories of information about your likes, your specifications and your current mood. I battled a bit uploading a photo to my profile and eventually gave up on that, moving on to other things.

Blueworld gives users the option of uploading photos and videos and publishing blog posts on the site. Much of the content comes with Muti-style voting so you can either vote “Love it” or “Hate it” and presumably affect that piece of content’s ranking on the page concerned.

Tags are a useful way to just mooch around and find stuff and if you do find something you want to share you have the option of sharing with the usual sites (Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us etc). Blueworld also has its own internal bookmarking function. The groups are very similar to Facebook groups.

A really nice feature is the ability to drag and drop elements on your profile page around so you can make your photos, videos or some other aspect of your profile more prominent.

Although Blueworld has members who are a bit older, the site seems better suited to people in their late teens and early 20s. I am certainly not the best demographic for the site (getting older and I can’t handle so much excitement 😛 ). If I were 10 years younger I could see myself spending a fair amount of time on the site although there would be a tension between Blueworld and Facebook for me. It would be interesting to know how many Blueworld users also use Facebook and which of the two services are used more. Blueworld has an advantage in that it is local and more relevant to what people are presumably doing here. Facebook is great as a connector but lacks that local feel.

There isn’t anything unique to Blueworld in terms of functionality and features but what makes this site work are its local flavour and the collection of tools and features like content sharing, bookmarking, social options and more. In a way it is similar in concept to the Zoopy site (albeit with far more functionality). Although their focuses are different, both sites are seeking to appeal to a local audience who want a South African site for their social interaction. You can do pretty much what you want to do on Blueworld and with a mobile element (which I haven’t really explored all that much but seems to be an sms service), Blueworld is a really funky site. I think there should be a mobile site of some sort (unless I missed it) given that the people likely to be using Blueworld spend most of their lives on their mobile phones. That is a feature that could take the site far beyond the Web site itself and out there into the general population.

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