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I talked a while back about Friend­ster, a social net­work­ing site. It’s got­ten a lot of press, and gar­nered itself some com­pe­ti­tion (imi­ta­tion being the sin­cer­est form of flat­tery. One of them is Tribe​.net, which looks to be a lit­tle less geared towards romance (not that you can’t use it for that) but sim­i­lar in over­all approach.

Tribe.net’s con­cept of tribes is the frame­work it uses to let you build your social net­work. Tribes can be formed around any­thing, includ­ing schools, com­pa­nies and geo­graph­i­cal regions. You can either cre­ate a tribe or join an exist­ing one. You can have friends like Friend­ster, but the tribes con­cept is empha­sized. Friend­ster does allow you to enter inter­ests, but it’s not clear how they’re linked since the entry is freeform (you can spell things any­way you want), so it would seem that tribes are poten­tially more useful.

Nei­ther Friend­ster or Tribe​.net seems to be good for get­ting musi­cians together, but I’m won­der­ing if the geo­graph­i­cal region aspect of Tribe​.net might work for that. I have yet to get any response on either. It’s begin­ning to look like the local alter­na­pa­per might still be better.

One major crit­i­cism of Friend­ster has been its per­for­mance, espe­cially under load. I haven’t spent a lot of time on Tribe​.net but it has seemed faster when I’ve used it. That could either be due to hard­ware or soft­ware, but it’ll be eas­ier to fix the for­mer (with some invest­ment) than the latter.

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