The latest installment in my whirlwind social-networking world tour is a video look at Zude, the hottest mashup-your-own-Web-page-until-you-drop -- that's the most succinct definition I could come up with -- platform out there. (Part one of the "tour" was this look at SocialText.)OK, so I talked with Steve Repetti, who's the chairman and co-founder of Zude, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. His enthusiasm for Zude is palpable, as you'll see when you watch the demo he gives in the video, below.

While I personally find Zude very interesting -- compelling, even -- I confess that I also find it a bit hard to classify. That "mashup" description I used at the outset is probably the most apt, but my problem here is I'm not a huge fan of the mashup concept because it seems so . . . unfocused.

On the other hand, Zude's expansive bag of tricks is its strength. It doesn't lock users into one particular way of doing things. In this sense, Zude really is a kind of MySpace on steroids. This does indeed appear to be Zude's aspirational sweet spot, a point that's emphasized by the omnipresent thumbnails (and not so thumbnails) of twenty-something minor media stars Hayden Panettiere and Anna Nalick. (Hey, I'm not complaining.)

Of course, Zude's "do what you want/will" ethos plays very well with its target user base, which skews younger and doesn't want, or need, directions. (The old folks are involved, too, as we see from Repetti's Zude page, and my interview with him, for that matter.)

In closing, I want to be careful not to conflate social-networking "destinations" like Zude with the heavy duty site creation tools such as Joomla, Clearspace, and SocialText. The latter -- an open-source CMS, a community platform, and an enterprise Wiki tool, respectively -- are the tools upon which Web 2.0 will be created. Sites like Zude are more like the Web 2.0 candy, which will draw users in. So both are vital to where the online world is headed.

OK, here now my video chat with the Zude dude:

Here are a couple of related posts: Joomla Rocks, Or How To Build A Professional Web Site For No Money Down, and

Video: Socialtext Turns Wiki Into Killer Web Platform.

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