Rethinking social networks with MyCube

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 23:40:20 -0400

Having just finished school I’ve made a recent resolution to clear out my Facebook account of all the crud that’s accumulated and “deactivate” all those applications I probably shouldn’t have tried in the first place - however I managed to get seriously sidetracked on a social networking binge, trying out; ВКонтакте, Orkut, 人人网, Tagged and others. Surprisingly I ended up with a brand new service showing a lot of promise that is developed here in Singapore!

“MyCube is a social exchange where you own, control and monetize your digital life”. What does this mean in practice? Well everything you upload you own (completely) and can save, move and remove at your will - nothing gets “kept” by the service provider.

The best part by far though is the fine-grained privacy controls, whenever I write, add or post anything I can choose exactly who can see it. Plus when I accept a new friend I get to choose how much of my profile they get to see - no longer is their the one-size-fits-all approach that Facebook is so fond of.

Finally in a very Flattr-esque fashion the service has built-in micro payments that users can create content and subsequently charge for.

Interested in signing up? The nice folks at MyCube have graciously handed me a handful of invites to hand out (Update: turns out I actually have an awful lot). To sign up head to beta.mycube.com and use the invitation code mcnicholash and you can get started with S$10 or so of cubes right away!

Maystreet

Rethinking social networks with MyCube