Review: ECirkit.com — a Dog in Wolf’s Clothing
dan tynan on Feb 28 2008 at 5:41 am | Filed under: Da Web, PC World, Reviews, Things that suck
This social network sees itself as a home for bikers, babes, and body art, but it’s strictly for dorks and dilettantes.
(An edited version of this entry originally appeared on PCworld.com)
by Dan Tynan
eCirkit bills itself as a social network for “artists, speed- and thrill-seekers, non-conformists, [and] extremophiles [sic] of every variety.” It’s extreme all right – extremely lame.
The idea is that once you join eCirkit, you’ll never have to go anywhere else. The site is designed around the WebTop — a single page that lets you access your photos, videos, blogs, RSS feeds, bookmarks, IM, contacts, and even a mini-browser. Meanwhile, its “Social Penetrator” applet (complete with power drill icon) drills into your eBay, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube accounts and pulls that information into your eCirkit profile.
It’s easy enough to set up and use, but the result looks like AOL circa 1989 – a series of cluttered, overlapping windows and crude widgets (like the power drill). The ‘penetrator’ only works in one direction, so if you add new information to your Facebook profile, you have to re-penetrate. Worse, opening multiple windows slowed both Firefox and IE to a crawl and eventually caused them to crash.
eCirkit has the usual social networking stuff – you can add friends, leave comments on other people’s photos and videos, and so on. But it doesn’t appear to be well populated. A broad search turned up roughly 8000 profiles, and many appear to be dummy or inactive accounts. Many of the profiles I looked at were created months ago and have not been visited since then. No surprise there.
The site does have some innovative features. Its ads fade subtly into the background of each window, and you can choose which brand logos you want to see. Every user gets a Vault with 1GB of free storage, so you can access files from any machine or share them with others. eCirkit serves up the usual warnings about avoiding copyright violations, but does nothing to prevent you from illegally swapping music or movies. The default setting is to make all content available to all users. Fine by me, but I don’t think the record companies will like that very much.
Yet the most remarkable thing about eCirkit is its cockiness. “In the ecosystem of life, there are sheep, and there are wolves. Which one are you?” The home page asks. Hmm. I know what I am. But eCirkit is just an ordinary mutt.
