A Webtop and social network hybrid

I’ve been watching the evolution of Webtops – essentially analogs of PC desktops delivered via the Web – since they first emerged. This area of Web applications is fascinating because the technical and operational challenges involved in delivering a workable and useful Webtop are not trivial. Moreover, once the tech stuff has been achieved a Webtop publisher’s biggest challenge is getting users to adopt their services as either augmentations or replacements for their existing desktops.

One of the latest and for me one of the most intriguing entrants into this market is eCirkit.

A small digression is in order here: To everyone developing Web applications, Web sites, blogs, or anything else online – stop with the “e’s” already! It is e-gregious and e-nnoying and it smacks of a lack of creativity that doesn’t add anything to your branding. OK, now I’ve got that out of my system we can continue …

ECirkit is a Webtop that implements a portal-based service combined with social networking facilities.

Once you’ve logged in you are presented with your community page. This community page is a static portal interface that shows a summary of your login details; the last eCirkit pages you visited; your contacts list, your media (videos and photos you’ve collected); your “Portfolio” (comments from other users, your bio, your blogroll, the RSS feeds you watch, your bookmarks; your “Vault” (200MB of file storage for any purpose you please); and your collection of things you want to sell.

All eCirkit pages include a menu bar that allows you to change the page to your Webtop page where you can open dynamic windows that deliver whatever features you want to use, the Contests page (we’ll come back to this), a Help page, and something called “CirkitVision” that plays a promo video about the service and from which I couldn’t figure out how to return to the rest of the service … I put that down to beta teething problems.

There’re also buttons on the menu bar to open any the service’s facilities as dynamic windows. These facilities include all of the Community features as well as e-mail (this can interface with your POP accounts as well as with eCirkit’s internal messaging), instant messaging (within eCirkit only), forums, account settings, and search in separate movable, resizable Webtop windows on top of your home page.

It may seem a little odd that the static portal home page can’t be moved or reorganized while all of the dynamic windows are completely configurable. The reason is that once eCirkit goes into full release the portal part of your account can be made publicly viewable – what the public will see will be in many respects much like a MySpace page.

So what distinguishes eCirkit from the rest of the wannabe MySpace clones? There are several things: A focus on “extreme” lifestyles (tattoos, motorcycling, hot cars), contests that relate to those interests, and single brand advertising skins that show advertiser branding on your pages.

The contests are impressive – they list a number of competitions where they have apparently given away things like an expensive sports car (I couldn’t find out any details on the site), a date with a Playboy model (a video is available if you can stand to watch it), and a tattoo executed by “Grime” (apparently a very famous tattoo artist – the video shows the winner getting a whole upper arm). ECirkit is currently running competitions for a motorcycle, a digital camera, and other goodies.

The single brand advertising works like this: When you sign up, you select which brand you want and is, as far as I’ve seen, fairly un-intrusive. The president and CEO of eCirkit, Bradley Farrell, told me that the concept behind the advertising is all about what he calls the Brand Exposure Index (BEI) rather than the normal measures of advertising, ad views and click-throughs. Driven by what eCirkit believes will be an engaging experience resulting in long user visits in which the service will deliver an extended exposure to the advertiser creating a more powerful brand recognition and consumer affiliation.

Farrell told me that future enhancements to eCirkit will include their “Social Penetrator” – a feature that can log on to  your various social networking accounts on Flickr, Facebook, etc., and automatically link and or extract your existing content for inclusion on eCirkit.

I’ll be curious to see how eCirkit evolves because the “extreme” lifestyles market is notoriously fickle and among some groups (skateboarders for example) brand affiliation waxes and wanes very quickly, which might affect eCirkit advertiser’s enthusiasm as well as the target market’s enthusiasm for eCirkit.

ECirkit is currently still in beta and access is by invitation only, but the service is scheduled to go to a full and open 1.0 release on Jan. 14.