Mourning the XuQa Zoo: Part 1
Some of you may be reading this thinking, “Who is this Amanda girl, anyway? Where did this n00b come from?” Um, I’m actually a former celebrity. A XuQalebrity to be exact. Never heard of me? Well, that’s because XuQa, the little college social networking site that had so much amazing potential, failed.
XuQa came around at the right time for the original crew. Back in September 2005, I found the fledgling little XuQa.com in its infancy. I had been on Facebook and MySpace, of course, but this was something fresh, something new.
XuQa had the personal profile, the “friending” capabilities, the message wall and all the obvious features we’ve come to expect from social networking sites. On XuQa you could also have an anonymous crush on someone and you could send your friends free gifts (years before Facebook caught on to that bright idea). But XuQa also had a bustling forum section, and for me, that made this little social network stand apart from its larger competitors.
I can’t lie– I used to spend hours on XuQa, responding to the never-ending stream of forum threads with topics ranging from political debates to hotness ratings to someone professing his love for one of the XuQa it-girls (me?).
People said exactly what they wanted to say without holding back. It was such an interesting little corner of the Internet—no one was afraid to offend, praise, announce or bash anything or anyone they wanted. In the beginning, XuQa really was a champion of social conversation.
So, why did XuQa fail?
It failed because it eventually alienated its core members. The sociology of the site’s changes was all wrong. The XuQa creators suddenly shifted the site’s norms, values and social format without warning.
Poker. Blatant popularity levels based on how many poker games you played. A shift in the cultural focus—in my opinion, you can’t have a thriving social networking site that markets itself equally to American college students and anyone with an e-mail address in Turkey.
Most of us all just got fed up. XuQa members who had been active and instrumental in creating the exciting social environment could literally no longer have the same XuQa experience they had come to love.
And it’s a shame. While we were creating and developing our own little Internet society, complete with codes of ethics, rules, norms and values, the makers of the site had some other agenda. One day, the entire site changed. Instead of focusing on conversation, XuQa decided to turn the site into a spam-filled, vapid waste hole. Thanks.
Imagine if you woke up one day and Twitter was suddenly all about fish, and if you didn’t have a comment about fish, then you couldn’t be part of the discussion. Um, of course you’d leave the site.
As social media adopters, when we are building social networks and helping develop micro-societies on the Web, we need to do more than just observe and pass judgment. As bloggers, we walk a fine line between commenting on what we think we see and analyzing what’s actually there.
I think there’s a large lesson to be learned from XuQa. We can’t always assume we know what people want, and if we only scratch the surface, we may miss the nuances that keep social networking micro-societies alive and kicking.
My cohorts and I loved this site–it gave us friendships, laughs and a very real sense of bonding within a community–but the creators of the site didn’t listen to the people who made XuQa what it was, and their changes have left the site a broken shell of what it used to be.
8 Responses to “Mourning the XuQa Zoo: Part 1”
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P.S. If you can log in and see this, it’s frightening: http://xuqa.com/search.php?b_name=gravel&search=search&cmd=blogsearch
This gives me memories! Anyway, I think social networking websites struggle with the fact that it’s hard to make money in this space, and the only way you can really do so is by aligning your goals (making money, getting more page views and members) with the population’s goals (having fun, making friends, whatever). What they should have done is figured out what the current members wanted… like maybe get the annoying bugs fixed? Think about it. It’s been two years and still messages and blog posts get stuck. Instead, they went about and did everything wrong. I thought they started out well, especially when they allowed for non-anonymous discussions and also when a primitive moderation system was implemented. But soon after, they started adding superfluous features and diluting the best parts of the site. I loved anonymous discussions, with their sexual tension and unnecessary drama and all.
But in the end, I guess they’re doing what they thought they needed to do and I think they’re making money from it or something. The only thing–and this is kind of painfully obvious–is that a peanut economy with leveling and poker are really lame concepts to build a community around and if that was how it was in the beginning, I’d never have joined.
Gravel I couldn’t have said this better myself. I hope one day the Xuqa developers read this and see just what has happened to a once-great site. Then maybe they’ll finally see that in their attempt to create the “perfect site”, they really just took a growing one and never let it mature, instead making it reach its second childishness way too early.
True storp. What separated Xuqa apart from the others was that it actually gave a platform for people to speak their mind- whether it was to have fun, actually partake in serious discussions, or whatnot. It was a great networking site- but the developers took it too far and instead of keeping it simple, went overboard.
how i miss xuqa….
seriously, NO ONE wasted more time on that site than i did.
i blame moving to a urban place for that, but anyways…i miss it ;_;
ah…and i did a search for rawr…i had 49 results lol
good job, pebbles ^_^
rawr dug this out of its grave: http://e7thstar.blogspot.com/
oh wow. I only just saw this. This brings back SO MANY memories and it’s nearly unfathomable to think that it was already two years ago.
I’ll definitely be checking this out.