I thought it only appropriate to kick off the holiday shopping season and make my first entry since Black Friday about the most ridiculously consumerist idea for a social network ever. The site is called Metrofunk.com and the premise is simple, an invite only social network for ‘trendsetters’. The premise raises three questions right off the bat. The first is, why does there need to be yet another social network that has no additional functionality to a Facebook or a MySpace. Second, and peripherally related, don’t the people who this service purports to serve, nightclub promoters, musicians, fashion designers, and film producers, and others already use MySpace to collect their fans and promote themselves? The final question is, why should it be invite only?

Their mission in their owns words is to:

1. give trend-followers a central place to gather information on trends and content pertaining to the world of nightlife events, fashion, music, and film and 2. To empower the trendsetters by providing them with online tools, resources, and a focused networking medium to expose and fulfill their product offerings.

Again, why is this unique? By making it invite only aren’t they just stiffling the promotion mission and alienating potential fans that could more easily be obtained through something like MySpace?

Even their homepage screams, this is a place or people who think they are better than everyone else, to make themselves feel like they are.

I mean take a look at that, it attempts to look vogue and sheik like the exclusive nightclub. While exclusivity may be good in theory to build buzz, its not the idea which the Web 2.0 is based around, openness and virality. By making it closed, how do they think they are going to make money? Ad revenue is measured in CPM, or cost per thousand. Having a necessarily small user base makes the website necessarily small. Now, the argument may be made that these users will be more valuable per CPM because they are the ‘trendy’ ones. But I don’t think that that is the way that advertisers will see it.

Therefore, this project seems doomed to fail, and rightly so, as the title of this post stated, this is exactly what ‘trendy’ people do not need. It seems to amount to nothing more than a clique that makes ‘trendy’ people feel better about themselves, with no real social utility that can’t be found elsewhere, and a user base that won’t expand very much if the site desires to keep itself exclusive.

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