Aussie social network Babbello , which launched 11 months ago, announced today that it has reached 30,000 members. But for those who are used to seeing venture-backed startups like Tagworld add millions of users within the same time frame (and still being criticized for failing to catch up with MySpace), those numbers aren't as big as you might hope. In Babbello's defense, however, they're catering solely to Australian users. They're also developing specialized social networks for other countries, with the Asian and Indian markets being potential candidates.
Features
You can also network with friends, write a blog, join groups, send messages, chat in the forums, create a photo album, leave comments, write lists of your favorite things, take quizzes, enter competitions, subscribe to RSS feeds and do pretty much everything you'd expect from a social networking site. Another worthwhile feature: you can track your profile visitors on a graph (so no need for a MySpace tracker, then). What's more, there are advanced privacy controls: you can make the sections of your space public, private, members-only and a host of other options.
Chat and Babbello IM
Babbello Widgets
Babbello has just added a new feature that's in beta: Babbello widgets let you take your blog entries, comments and images and syndicate them on other networks like MySpace, Piczo and hi5. You can customize the size, fonts, colors and borders of the widget before pasting the code into your page.
Only 30,000 Users?
In a world where social networks are hyping up their stats like crazy, it seems odd that a feature-rich network like Babbello isn't growing faster. I can only assume they need to work harder on the marketing side, since the site itself is solid. But there are other concerns, too - MySpace Australia was rolled out over the past few months, and could squash some of the smaller Australian networks.
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