Nick Lachey's Celebrity Social Network - Flop or YFly?

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YFly, the celebrity social network for teens that boasts actor/singer Nick Lachey as one of its founders, relaunched on August 15th - at least according to multiple comments around the site. However, there's been virtually no press coverage, and only one blog entry mentions the relaunch in passing (Defamer did feature it, but they were light on details).

When it first went live in February, YFly positioned itself as a safer alternative to MySpace (don't they all?) for the teen market, free from "predators and cyberbullies". They had another key selling point, too: access to real celebrity profiles. The "Certified Celebrities" included Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams and Nick Lachey himself, and there are currently 30 celebrities listed. The other co-founders were entrepreneurs Drew Levin and Daniel Perkins, along with Tom Petters (CEO of Petters Group Worldwide), AJ Discala (Founder of Calico Capital Group) and Parry Aftab (Executive Director, Wired Safety).

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Even so, I'm not sure that the prospects are good for YFly - the celebrity angle is a great way to pull in the mainstream audience, but there's really very little to do once you arrive. And between MySpace, Friendster, hi5, Bebo, Multiply, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Piczo and the thousands of smaller networks, this space is looking extremely crowded. Is star appeal enough to differentiate a fairly average site? I'm not so sure.

Attention YFly Users!

Mashable's YFly account is here - feel free to add Mashable to your friends list if you sign up, or you're already a member.

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