YourHub, The Buffalo News' fledgling social networking site, has been around for a few months now and I was initially reserving judgment because a website is only as bad as its content, and there wasn't much content yet. Well, after four months of paying local self-published wordsmiths to fill their site by plugging their novels, today's discussion topic is: drinking too much coffee
. When the inevitable follow-up came I could not help but contribute. Only after I had pushed the Send button did I remember the photo I had posted on my profile lo these many months ago .Now I'm not going to knock YourHub because it's not like I haven't been down that road on (e:strip) myself (e:zobar,37304) . And it's academically interesting that, despite its stated corporate goal of being inclusive of all 630,000 Buffalo News readers, it's becoming an in-club just like any other social networking site - that the in-people [most or all of whom are paid to be there] have formed their own community and are talking about their caffeine intake and their favorite Italian restaurants just like the rest of us unpaid local bloggers. Except that they can't really speak freely because they can't say anything that would offend Depewites' tender sensibilities. Which means that not only are they talking about in-stuff we don't care about, it's totally watered down. It's like eating someone else's cold tapioca when you don't like tapioca and you're not hungry. Or like reading Buffalo Current without Sabrina the Creepy Sex Columnist (GOOGLE - cache:www.buffalocurrent.com).
But I guess that's all to be expected. This is what bugs me about YourHub. It is divided into neighborhoods: Amherst/Clarence, 'Central,' Grand Island/Ken-Ton, Hamburg/West Seneca, Niagara Falls, Orchard Park/East Aurora, Southern Tier, and West Niagara County. They are arbitrary but at least they're well-defined ... except for Central. I kind of figured that since Buffalo is the county seat and that's also where the Buffalo News is headquartered, Central meant the Buffalo city proper. But no!
It appears that they completely forgot to include the city in their list of neighborhoods. So where is an urban hipster like myself supposed to post the pictures I took drinking PBR in the booth at Frizzy's?And that is why we have (e:strip).
- Z
Another project that is doomed to failure. Its suburb-centric and appears to be completely lame. If people want a real local social site, they can look no further than here. After all, the chic hipster wannabes are all coming from Clarence to the strip to hang out anyway.
wooooeee! Those wild and crazy kids! Drinking a LARGE coffee!!
(thought I must admit, I really did feel seriously high once, like on-illegal-drugs-high, after drinking far too much coffee.)