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Posted by John Lockwood on November 10th, 2007

I’ve been known to be somewhat ambivalent about Social networks (ya think?), and anyone who enjoy’s Andrew Keen is not a likely candidate to score very highly on the Web 2.0 hype-o-meter.

Having said that, I’m really getting quite a treat out of Web 2.0’s newest starchild, Cre8Buzz. Real Estate professionals can join here. (I’m not sure whether the general sign-up is open to the public yet or not. It was “invitation only” when I first visited). When you come by, be sure to visit me and say hello.

There’s an interesting ranking system, “Buzz Rank”, that combines other users voting for you and your own participation. If you use their widget, the score that’s published is your score within your community category, not your overall score for the site, which is kind of neat. OK, what can I say — I was the Lisa Simpson type of kid who liked to bring home “A’s” on my report card.

It’s still pretty new, so there’s a good chance the Antman will come by to say hello to you in person. Ants with megaphones — what’s not to love? Social network — cute.

Everyone to date has been pretty hail fellow well met with no special politics brewing yet.

Another thing I like — I mean I really like — is the fact that people aren’t contacting me to install the newest Facebook application. Being poked was silly enough, but getting Superpoked with a sheep thrown at you is just TOO IMMATURE. But ants with megaphones, on the other hand — that’s an age appropriate play group for me.

It has a customizable profile page a la Myspace, which I like since my alter-ego the real estate broker capitalist can put up the corporate logo and feel good about it. JavaScript widgets don’t work — tried that. Of course, the downside of customization is that you bump into the usual folks who have fairly unreadable pages with background images of light green aliens and foreground text that’s dark green 4 pixel high Old English Script italic or what have you. People, I know you’re all democratically broadcasting yourself and all, but readability matters.

My only real complaint so far, and I’m sure this’ll get fixed as time goes on, is the interface to the blog, which is primitive in the extreme. We’re talking you can’t yet code an HREF tag in there. It finds “http://” and does the right thing with that, but no links of a more sophisticated nature are allowed. Even some of the most basic formatting just doesn’t work. But what the heck — it’s a beta, and it’s a social networking web site, not a pacemaker, so as a programmer I get it.

OK, just one other thing. I know the developers are probably too young to know about this movie that was already sixteen years old when I watched it as a kid, but here’s the thing: ants don’t buzz. They make the Them! movie ant noise. If you’ve never heard that noise before, you really should go check out Them!. Watch the whole movie, or fast forward to about 27 minutes 30 seconds and you’ll not only get to watch Joan Weldon walking around, which is always a treat, but if you let it play about two minutes you’ll get to hear plenty of good ant noises.