So you can make your own blog with WordPress, and your own social network with Ning, but what about all the social content websites — sites like YouTube, Yelp, Flickr, IMDb — what would you do if you wanted to create one of your own quick and dirtily? Launching today, hat’s the question BricaBox — a New York-based startup that lets you create your own social content site — set to answer. Allen Stern from CenterNetworks has some extensive coverage of the launch.
BricaBox, as mentioned above, offers five different kinds of sites for you to create. There’s a restaurant review site, photos + mashup site, website review site, video collection site, and discussion board — any one of those types of sites you want, you can click on, choose a name and subdomain, and use their neat AJAX-based drag and drop interface to create the site to your liking.
To test it out, I set out to create a video collections (i.e. YouTube) clone — and here is what I came up with. While it is fairly simplistic and surely not what Ning is to social networks, the basic functionality of your desired kind of site exists, and the most important thing is that it works. Of course, BricaBox is not just a clone-creator but a whole platform, so a very neat thing they allow you to do create a BricaBox site from scratch without having to select from their set selection.
Apart from blogging — where WordPress is a instrumental utility — I’m very skeptical of the concept of clone-creating websites. Why a mainstream using would want to make their own social network or YouTube or Flickr still manages to puzzle me. Of course, that is not to say that there isn’t an audience for this at all. These tools can be extremely helpful to small – medium-sized groups and communities, which I think makes for their best target audience. And such an audience probably applies to BricaBox — if you have a need for it, then it’s probably your option.
