Yuwie - First Social Network To Pay Its Members

Social Networking has become very popular in recent years and people are spending hours after hours just blogging, browsing pictures and leaving messages for their friends. At the moment, I’m working on a location-based mobile social networking tool with two friends, so I was looking around some existing social networks. Besides looking at Friendster, MySpace and Facebook, I also came across this social networking site which pays its members. While it’s not my first time stumbling upon the site, I decided to join it this time round.

My reasons for joining are simply:

1. to explore current social networking sites
2. Just in case it really starts to become big.

To be frank, I’m quite skeptical against anything that pays members to do certain things such as getting paid to surf or to read emails. My skepticism level increased after Agloco came up with such a lousy toolbar when they built up all that hype. It’s amazing how they wasted all that publicity and the huge membership base. With that aside, I am still fairly open as I have seen people getting paid quite good money to do surveys and to go shopping. Besides, my first check online was from a Get Paid To Surf site, which I believed was called DesktopDollars or something. I can’t really recall how much it was, but probably around $100.

Anyway, my point is not for everyone to go out there and join such websites in hopes to get rich, because you probably won’t. With tremendous amount of hardcore internet marketing, you may be able to get a four-figure income after a few years, but you will almost certainly get a five-figure income if you spend all those efforts to promote affiliate programs.

I would say that it’s only worth joining such sites when you truly enjoy the service. For example, I have Google toolbar on both my computers even though it doesn’t pay me and I use it for all my searches, which means $$$ for Google. Similarly, those get paid to surf programs can provide a service to me by offering a superior toolbar and making the cash a secondary factor. Too often though, these programs concentrate too much on the element of paying members and come out with substandard toolbars.

About Yuwie
With regards to Yuwie, I find the interface fairly confusing and overly cluttered when I first visit the site. For some unexplained reason, the navigation doesn’t seem to be as smooth as my experience with Friendster and Facebook. Maybe it’s because I didn’t spend too much time navigating around. In terms of features, it’s just like other social networking sites, but they don’t have those external applications that we see frequently in Facebook. Anyway, some people tend to hate that feature, but for me, I really love those.

I think that their website is quite good for a social networking site and has all the basic features. Their founder also stated that their main aim is not to attract people based on the element of getting paid, but rather hoping that users like using Yuwie. He just thinks that it’s cool for people to get paid doing what they are already doing and I have to agree on that. Will Yuwie be successful or will it be just another disappointment like Agloco and other ‘Get Paid To’ companies?

I don’t know, but I’m hopping on first just in case it becomes popular in future. Anyway, it doesn’t cost me anything, so why not? If you would like to look around their site and probably join as my friend, here’s the link:
http://www.yuwie.com/r/25897/

P.S: Don’t join if you are expecting this to make you rich. If you love social networks though, you may want to take a look and hopefully get some spare change over time.