Tuesday, November 28, 2006
WAYN
Not sure if anyone out there uses the service WAYN (www.wayn.com). I joined over a year ago after I was traveling around in Australia and many of the people I met there recommended it to me. Now, I was doing a lot of backpacking, so keep in mind these are people that travel a lot more frequently. The service is very much like Facebook, or MySpace, but with an added twist. The site focuses on younger people who travel a lot by allowing them to, in addition to maintaining a profile, list paces that they will be traveling to in the future and then being able seeing who else within the network be at that same location when they will be visiting. To be honest I haven’t used this feature to meet people in places that I have traveled to, but more so to keep track of where my friends will be traveling to. The reason I bring this up is that yesterday the site received $11 million in funding from Esprit Capital Partners. Makes me wonder if Esprit is trying to cash in on the web 2.0/user generated content craze much like Sequoia did with Youtube, VantagePoint and Redpoint did with myspace and Accel and MeriTech hope to do with facebook. I absolutely hate the commercialization of all these social networking sites. I do believe WAYN is and can be valuable however, given its broader market scope, but its important to keep in mind that its much more of a niche market so to speak because of its focus on travel. Surely will be interesting to see where this all goes. I’ll try to get an update in a few months.
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2 comments:
well we will see....I think it is a good step if they will use money wisely :) site is great so I hope it will a this way :)
I hope they use it wisely as well and not to simply increase the value and sell it off to some larger company. Though, that’s hard to imagine because the VCs will want to see some return on their investment. Let’s hope that we're not bombarded with ads or privacy is not compromised. There's not many good social networking sites left that haven't become too commercialized or have compromised privacy.
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