TWO NEW TIMESUCKS

Timesuck: n. 1.A person, good, service or activity one spends a large amount of time on; possibly more than one's spouse or mother thinks one should. (eg. homestarrunner.com, X-Box, Dungeons and Dragons, world peace)

Here are two new timesucks for the internet savvy. Tagworld.com and Multiply.com. I have a toe in them both (here and here); they've only sucked an hour of my time each so far (Firefox required). I'm undecided on whether these two burgeoning rivals to myspace are time worthy yet - and they WOULD require large amounts of time to fully utilize. What do you think?

Here's what Fast Company thinks:

"TagWorld's real competitive advantage, however, isn't its jukebox or some other widget. It's the real-time information the site gathers. Musicians who post their music and videos online will be rewarded with demographics on exactly who is listening and where, bloggers will see exactly which other members are reading them, and advertisers, once there are some, will be able to find out similar information (within privacy guidelines, of course). That kind of supermuscular data and easy, automatic feedback makes TagWorld's platform even more potentially valuable to businesses than the current generation of social networks. "It's really the way business will be conducted going forward," says Rifkin. "Businesses can have a lot of data without putting the work into it. Let's say you are sitting on your computer listening to Bloc Party and automatically that info is posted on your Web site. You've generated content by the act of doing something for yourself. That information will automatically get pushed to me, as a marketer, and I get a list at the end of every day." In other words, when you press play on your music player, that choice could become a bit of autogenerated content, and a piece of easily aggregated and invaluable marketing information (e.g., the number of urban 19-year-old girls who downloaded the song yesterday)." (The Network Unbound)