Tagworld, the Myspace killer.

With Myspace getting so much press lately I thought it’s time to check out their competition. By the way, Myspace has over 46million users now. Anyway, I had signed for a Tagworld account a few weeks back after reading about them over at Techcrunch. At first glance, Tagworld seems to be a Myspace killer; well, at least as far as cool features go. If you’re not familiar with Tagworld,

“TagWorld combines the power of people, photos, blogs, tagging and storage in a single, free and easy-to-use online service, complete with powerful web 2.0 tools!”

TagWorld is a place to “socialize” if you’re in to music and have the time and patience to set-up your personal page. They have a rich set of social features that no other social community currently has. A few of the features that caught my eye were their Bookmarking, File Storage and Music Storage options;
They have a del.icio.us type bookmark function that includes the “Add to TagWorld” and “My TagWorld” buttons that you can add to your browser bar. When you add a bookmark you can chose a private or public setting so that you can either share or not share your bookmark with the community. Of course, just like Del.icio.us you can tag your bookmarks. However, in my opinion, you’re better off sticking with Del.icio.us for your standard bookmarks and only using the TagWold bookmarks for stuff that you want to share with the community.

The File Storage function is pretty cool, It appears that you can upload, tag and share just about any kind of file. I can see how this could be a cool social feature for sharing with members in your network. I’m not sure what the storage limit is (the have a bad help section or lack there of) but I think I heard it was 1gb. Also, it apears that they don’t have any kind of batch upload. Hopefully soon they will.

The music storage and player feature is, I think, suppose to be TagWorld’s big differentiator. It will be. However, as of yesterday I couldn’t get that shit to work. First of all, the only kind of music files you can upload are MP3 files. Which is not that bad except I have a lot of music in AAC format. Secondly, you can only upload one file at a time. Who has that much time to upload one song at a time? I would hope that they’ll incorporate a batch upload sometime soon. However, that’s all for naught if you don’t have a music player that works. I uploaded a few songs to play on my account but could never get them to play. I’m sure this is one of the problems that you have when you’re a rapidly growing site. The music player is also used to listen to music that’s on the Band/artist page. They have a cool function that allows you to add a song or all songs to your player in one click. If they can get this function worked out then I can see a bunch of user leaving Myspace.

One thing that I didn’t get to check out on TagWorld was their Band/Artist page functions. But accroding to Techcrunch;

“Bands can upload a GB of music and have a number of DRM options to control distribution. “

It also looked like from the picture on the Techcrunch post that Bands had access to some stats as well. This could be a great thing for Band promotions. If anyone out there has a band page set-up on Tagworld, then let me know what kind of features you have.

Over all, I like TagWorld, I think they still have some kinks to work out but that will come in time. I’m sure I missed a lot of the functions and features but since they don’t have a noticeable help section or any tutorials, I had to discover everything on my own. It looks like they have a strong management team and are out of the gates with over 470k members. Not to shabby. I’ll continue to check in on them to see how everything’s going. If they can the kinks worked out I’ll get all of my MySpace friends to sign-up and i’m sure others will also.

Take a look at my Tagworld page, and request to be a friend.

technorati tags: tagworld, myspace, community, social+network, music