Saturday, October 14, 2006

Introduction To Wallop

A lot of people are hearing the hype about a new Social Networking website called Wallop. There is a lot of rumors
flying around that this was a Microsoft initiative but they dropped it and others continued the project.

The truth is that Microsoft has an equity stake in Wallop but they are an independant company. I am impressed so far with what I have seen of the beta version. I love the contact grouping functionality in fact I have been bugging LinkedIn for this for a couple years now. The network view is also quite revolutionary as I can visualize which contacts are in my realm and see a thumbnail picture of people so I can more quickly find the person I am looking for. I love that you can share music and pictures with others but also limit them to the groups you create as well.

Firstly, to get invited you need to either find someone else who has an invitation or go to www.wallop.com and on the home page is a place to request an invitation. I got mine through the latter.

The first thing to do once registered is to upload your picture to your profile. Right now this process is not fully intuitive so you may have to play with your uploaded picture a little to get it as your profile picture. Once this is done you will get 5 invitations to send.

For those trying to compare this experience to another Social Network, I would tend to compare it more to MySpace than LinkedIn but I feel that comparing this to MySpace is not a real fair comparison as I think Wallop is going places MySpace is only dreaming of.

They even have an API to allow others to customize their experience and create mods to share with others.
I have only just downloaded the API, but I am hoping to create my own mods soon.

Over the next couple months I am hoping more of you will get connected to Wallop and send me a link to your favorite mods along with other tips and tricks on how to use wallop.

As more invitations become available to me I will try and share them with the group.

Happy Neworking.

Jeff Pontes Social Media Search