Recently I’ve gone on a joining spree through sites all over the place to try and get my blog a bit more out there, and by far the most interesting little thing I’ve stumbled across is what they offer at Wakoopa.com. It may seem like the most completely nonsensical thing you’ve ever seen, but it’s actually rather interesting to see what crops up.
What it is, in a nutshell.
Wakoopa is meant to keep track of your application usage, whether web-apps or through Windows itself. It’s insane to see just how much I go through in a single hour with things running, being done, and what sites I’ve been going through that actually have any kind of merit, so to speak, such as Facebook, or Twitter, or even YouTube.
Weirdly, it’s even managed to catch some of the random things I was just looking at while browsing for new communities to join– some things I wasn’t even aware were relevant (one had to do with real estate, I don’t even know why that was suggested to me by this other site I was browsing, but it was). It tracks /everything/, and in the end, after a short period, it will start giving you application recommendations, and keep track of your usage overall.
Why It’s Really Interesting.
It’s not just the fact that it tracks things, or offers you recommendations, it’s all of that put together and the fact that it is a pseudo social community network that will help you meet like-minded people. The fact that it makes note of applications you may have forgotten about in a late night haze of finding new things to work with is just a bonus, in a way. I’m hoping, in the end, to make the kind of networking connections I need to make friends and perhaps further myself as a blogger– though I honestly hate the term blogger, I just write stuff.
Most people won’t find it as interesting as I do for these reasons, but it’s still a good way to monitor what exactly is going on with what you’ve done in the last day, to see if you actually worked on that project you swore you were going to dedicate an hour to, or whether you just hallucinated that in order to get back to your game of Animal Crossing– maybe it’ll make us all a bit more responsible?
Ease of Joining.
It took me, oh, I don’t know, ten seconds to join. It really was decidedly simple, and while there’s a plethora of information you can fill out after the initial join phase, it really was so easy to join that I’m sure that my boyfriend (who often has me setting up accounts for him) could even do it and not give me five minutes of whining about how it’s better when I do it. That right there is enough to get most people to at least try it out.
In Closing.
This kind of thing might not have a major market, but people though the same thing about people in the beginnings of Twitter, how no one was going to want to post little tidbits about the inner workings of their day, or links to interesting things. It’s been happening for ages– Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Steam– all these things started as ideas that people weren’t fully sure would be backable, but interest in them caught on in one way or another and they’ve grown.
I’m not saying that Wakoopa is the next Twitter, but it’s interesting enough to get me invested, so… that’s saying something. If you want to try it out, and then see about adding me as a contact, feel free to check me out at wakoopa.com/aidorei.