RIPL Only a Drop in the Bucket

A friend of mine mentioned that she had an invite to the social networking site RIPL and was wondering if I knew anything about it. I did some digging around, and found that there really is not a ton of information out there about this site. What I did fine, though, did not make it seem too appealing.

They are pretty big on the idea of customization, to the point that I’d think they are on the path to MySpace’s horrendousness. Also, the screenshots that I did see of it show a lot of advertising, which, as you know, I hate with a burning passion. The one bright side of the advertising is that they allow you to choose what gets displayed on your profile. The downside is that they’re treating this as content, which I think many would disagree with. The other thing they are proud of is their privacy system. They say that you can have very granular control over who can see you, and what they can see.

I think that RIPL’s biggest problem is that most everything they tout as an advantage for them is now easily available on Facebook via applications. Having your playlists and such automatically displayed on your profile is now as easy as installing the Last.fm app. RIPL did start at the end of 2005, though, which was well before Facebook apps was known. Today, though, I think that they are going to just be another wanna-be in the market for social networking.

RIPL is currently only availble to students of the University of Washington and the University of Central Florida, or if you have an invite.