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Fatdoor finally has a public offering after tons of funding and privacy issue concerns
Written By jasonmalone on Jun. 19, 2008.
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After what seems like forever, a well funded social network site finally has a public offering after realizations that the initial concept for Fatdoor would lead to a myriad of privacy issues. Here is a snippet from their email today:
"Thanks for requesting an invitation to Fatdoor, we appreciate your patience. We've been busy building a new site, and as you may have noticed, we also changed our company name to Center'd (www.centerd.com) to better reflect our new product."
Snazzy looking site, with a nice mix of graphic elements and photography.
Does anyone think this idea can take off?
Scrivs
Written Jun. 19, 2008 / Report /
What is fatdoor supposed to be?
jasonmalone
Written Jun. 19, 2008 / Report /
Fatdoor is a social network that planned to be community based and provide locality and interest based groups to have a more adult social network. They halted their development after concerns about the idea of them crawling the web for information and creating associations with users based on information found regarding their locality (physical and online resources). A nice article on that can be seen here: http://localonliner.com/2007/04/17/fatdoor-crawls-the-web-for-neighbor-info/
Fatdoor received 5.5 million in additional funding (http://mashable.com/2007/11/13/fatdoor-funded/) at the end of 2007, but went lame duck amid privacy concerns. Now they are back as Centerd and focusing on the organizational aspect of local community and social network.
So, to rephrase my question, is there actual interest in an adult oriented community based social network like this. I ask because I wm working on a concept like this and would be interested to see if they can be successful beyond initial funding and if anyone thinks that there with be a migration from Facebook or MySpace to these less anonymous yet more private communities.
Scrivs
Written Jun. 19, 2008 / Report /
To me this seems like something that is great in concept, but at the moment might not play out right. Kind of something before its time because I'm not sure people are still secure about letting people know these types of things. But then again, people seem to have no problem posting this information on Facebook or Myspace.
I would actually focus on the younger demographics because they like to find people with the same interests just as much as adults and would be more willing to participate in such a thing. Today's adults didn't grow up with social networking tools and some are still getting used while others don't bother with them or know about them at all.
Also tools like this become more useful when there is a mobile aspect involved. Doesn't seem that much more than Meetup with some social networking involved though.