A couple of years ago, I started laying down plans to build a pinoy-focused blog publishing network, in the same vein as LiveJournal. It was to be called "BlogJam." I spent about 18 months building it on and off, until I came upon the realization that it wasn’t the kind of project that you could just build from the proverbial grassroots, especially when you were financing it with the average income of a third-world developer. At that point, I had built about 75% of all the functionality, although I lacked the actual design templates that would give each user’s blog its form.
After much thought, I decided to shelf the project until one of two things happened: either I found enough money to get it going properly, or I thought of something totally innovative that would by itself be enough to "sell" the site to its potential audience. Since neither of those things happened, I instead went on a half-bitter creative binge that resulted in oKs.ph and gibbity.com, respectively (not that I think either of those projects were "poor consolations," mind you; they were certainly quite a bit smaller in terms of amibition and scope though).
During that same period, the people behind dotPH introduced their new i.ph service, which is essentially a more professional version of the site I had been trying to build as an individual. For the most part, their featureset looks pretty decent, and considering their monopoly as the Philippines only domain-name registry, they certainly have the financial foundations to properly grow a business like this.
But of course, neither of those two anecdotes are the point of this post, because I’m really writing because of this ambitious, pinoy-made Blogspot-like project, FunChain. On his blog, creator Jason Banico explains why he is (re)building FunChain as a sort of fusion between BlogSpot and MySpace. This bit, in particular, stood out:
MySpace has a crappy blogging tool, and Blogger doesn’t even have asocial networking back-end. LiveJournal has some social networkingattached to it somewhat, but the point is moot since it has been leftin the dust. [...] Now, there have been attempts to create this blogging + socialnetworking hybrid, like Yahoo! 360. However, despite Yahoo!’s might, itfailed to make this fly. Why? Well, because the blogs in 360 don’t lookany better than those of Friendster or MySpace.
Off-hand, this seems like he may be underestimating the competition somewhat, but that might just be me. Yahoo!360 is a relatively young service, and the big Y! has more than enough money to keep it going for as long as it takes to take hold. (360 isn’t an experiment so much as an imperative for Yahoo, and given that their network has 191 million registered users, it’s not particularly at a loss for an audience to "force" the service on.)
Technology-wise, FunChain is still pretty rough so it’s difficult to get a bead on exactly where he’s at, although I’ll assume from the "Beta Release" on his headers that he’s still quite a ways off. (The lack of a WYSIWYG editor for his blog-editor was particularly telling.) Appearance-wise, I must say I’m a bit irked by the fact that it looks too much like Blogger.
The one thing I do like is how the navigation is arranged at the top of the screen (Home, Profile, Blogs, Network, Messages, Search), which makes a lot of sense and really helps keep the various sections organized in your head.
Check out FunChain beta here. (And check out the blog I created here.)