New Social Networking Technology Packs a Wallop

A spinoff company from Microsoft called Wallop, still in invitation-only mode, hopes to redefine online social networking. While the details are not complete, Wallop is a flexible platform that allows people to centralize blog posts, photos, videos, and conversation in one place. More versatile than Facebook, but cleaner in design than MySpace, Wallop aims to bridge the gap between these two sites.

One of the more interesting features, labeled as the “radar,” displays a graph of a user and his/her relationships. Although its meant to be an easy way to communicate with multiple friends at once, it also visually represents the strength of each relationship, as determined by a matrix of possible factors. This has a direct tie to our class discussion of strong vs. weak ties as well as the distribution of power in a relationship.

Wallop, the social network where you pay for pretty

The CNET article above also discusses how Wallop takes on attributes of Second Life, because it allows users to make money. Developers who are skilled with making Wallop widgets and design packages, can offer to sell their products to users - and Wallop makes it easy to market.