The Green Cup

I talked last week about WebTop – the West Virginia Department of Education’s virtual desktop and accompanying tools. One of those tools is WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities is a closed social network for state education. At the moment it’s inhabited by the employees of the state’s schools systems. But eventually the plan is to include students.

WebTop Communities home page I get when I’m logged in.

WebTop Communities gets compared to MySpace by WVDE staff. I’m a member of MySpace and Facebook. I like Facebook more. MySpace seems a little more cumbersome to me than Facebook.

There are some ways that I think WebTop Communities is like MySpace, some ways it is like Facebook, and some ways it is different from both of them.

WebTop Communities is like both MySpace and Facebook in a number of ways. It includes its own messaging system where you can send other members emails, and it will notify you that you have email waiting. But MySpace sends you an email telling you that someone has sent you an “email” on MySpace, and you then have to login at MySpace to read that message (which I find inconvenient); Facebook and WebTop Communities both send you the text of your message in an email, and you only have to login to the service if you want to reply.

My friends at WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities, MySpace, and Facebook all three allow you to formalize relationships by “friending” people within the network. But Facebook and MySpace require those relationships to be reciprocal: I friend you, you friend me back (or approve my “friend request”) and then we’re friends. WebTop Communities allows you to display people as “friends” on your page without them listing you as friends on their page (and vice versa). And in that sense it is more like Twitter (which allows you to “follow” people who don’t follow you).

My WebTop Communities profile page.

Unlike MySpace and Facebook (or Twitter for that matter), WebTop does not have a place for personal, status, or “mood” updates. On Facebook there’s a window when you login that asks “What’s on Your Mind?” On MySpace the Status and Mood page asks “What are your doing right now?” And Twitter asks simply “What are you doing?” There is nothing like a “status update” on WebTop Communities. That makes it a little more like LinkedIn – a professional network. Social, but professional…

WebTop Communities is more like Facebook than MySpace in the ease with his smaller groups within the larger social network can be formed. So for example, I have a closed community within WebTop specifically of staff at my school. I moderate the community, decide how visible it is to users who are not members of my community. And I determine who can be a member of the community. MySpace may be able to do this (I’m not absolutely sure), but such pages are legion on Facebook. WebTop Communities makes them very easy to create and use.
Like both Facebook and MySpace, there is a blog tool in WebTop Communities. And recent blogposts show up on the WebTop Communities home page.

My blog page at WebTop Communities.

So I guess my main point is that the community is unique. While its appearance hasn’t changed much in the year since I joined (my first blog post at WebTop was July 23, 2008), I suspect it’s capacity has increased greatly and the ideas for its future have multiplied.

I think WebTop Communities feels more like Facebook. MySpace has always had a problem with spam that is, well, in poor taste. I’ve rarely experienced that on Facebook (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen). I hope that WebTop Communities will become more like Facebook in that Facebook has seen a proliferation of applications for users – games, quizzes, etc. I know that the WebTop apps would be educational. But if we’re building a social network to include students in an educational setting, I think such applications would have potential.

Finally, Facebook is growing. MySpace isn’t. I hope that WebTop grows…