Martha Stewart Announces Social Network

Posted by Brian Balfour in UncategorizedMay 24th, 2006 | 3 responses

Apparently Martha’s jail time got her thinking how much she likes to interact with people. Today Martha Stewart Announced that she will be developing a social network aimed at women 25-45 which will be part of marthastewart.com. From the news.com article:

“The network would appeal to women aged 25 to 45, and allow members to share photographs, scrapbooks, recipes and similar projects with one another and home design experts…”

I agree with the post on Micro Persuasion that this is a failure in process. They plan on launching the network late next year which is ridiculous. A network like this could be built easily in a month, and if you had a couple savvy internet entrepreneurs on it, a couple weeks. The SN space will be dramatically different by late next year and everything we see now in social networks will be old news.

I expect someone to launch another social network targeting this crowd within the next three months. In addition there is already a social network targeting the professional woman, DownTownWomensClub.com. However, it is worth noting that it costs $50 to join which is a huge barrier to entry for a social network.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Martha Stewart, DowntownWomensclub, Vertical Social Network, Brian Balfour[/tags]



3 Responses to “Martha Stewart Announces Social Network”

  1. Ted Rheingold says:
    May 25, 2006 at 12:51 pm

    Even bigger, check out clubmom.com. However, for $50M in funding to date, imagine what it really could be compared to what it is.

    Martha’s community should so pretty okay simply due to the audience she can move to the site and the experts that could keep them there. But the corporate taint will leave the door wide open for MANY passion-initiated parental-oriented communities.

  2. brian says:
    May 25, 2006 at 1:11 pm

    Thanks Ted,

    I knew there was another one out there, but at the time of writing I couldn’t think of it for some reason.

    Brian

  3. Stephanie says:
    June 8, 2006 at 11:06 pm

    There are so many new family sites popping up. OurStory.com has a similar service, which allows you to share timelines of personal and family history. There is also a photo feature, as well as the ability to print a nicely bound book which you can give as a keepsake. It’ll be interesting to see how Martha’s site competes since she already has such a following…

Leave a Reply