With the ongoing discontent at America's most popular college networking site - first with the Facebook news feed feature and then with the revelation that the site will be opened to everybody, some users claim to be disenchanted. The obvious question is: will they defect to another site? Facebook probably consider themselves to be in a great position - there seems to be no direct competitor in the college market. However, an upstart called Uspot does offer a competitive product, available only to those with a .edu address (and, for a short while at least, those prepared to lie on the sign-up form).
In fact, Uspot is a worthy competitor to Facebook apart from one thing: it hardly has any users. And since users are the lifeblood of social sites, the impressive feature set and design do nothing to fix the chicken-and-egg problem. Uspot would be wise to promote itself as the de-facto Facebook alternative, perhaps snagging a few of the Facebook dissenters along the way.
