Fraced - Social Networking Back To The Basics

By Antti Vilpponen, October 13, 2008, 3 Comments

Fraced is a relatively new, Helsinki based, social networking service. They themselves state that they are a user centric location based social network. The basic features in the service include a map based view to your network, a dashboard view to activities in your network, message center, photo sharing, video sharing and blogging.

I signed up and it slightly shocked me that they had my photo online already, but of course they pulled it from Gravatar and thus speeded up things in signing up. However, things like this should be in some way made clear to the user. These sort of shock moments aren't very appealing as you try out the service for the first time.

Nevertheless, the service in itself looks very clean and usability is good. However, it still makes me wonder what the service is for? A cleaner UI and a few cool features aren't enough to pull your network off from other social networking services. Secondly, the identity of the individuals behind the service are a mystery as they don't state any names related to the team. Even I was approached with an unnamed e-mail message from the service undersigned as "-Someone".

TOPICS finland fraced helsinki

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Kristoffer Lawson October 13, 2008

I had a look at it last week and my question was whether the map is updated in realtime. Ie. do they have location based clients for the iPhone and alike? If not then isn't the map really just a quick mashup with Google based on what the user states their location to be?

I still find Facebook confusing. The whole new vs old debate was just silly for me: neither is particularly great, just bad in different ways. So perhaps there is room for social networks done well. However, entry into the market is going to be difficult as everyone already has their networks elsewhere.

Tair, October 13, 2008

Hiya, Antti! I spammed, sorry my fault. Just forgot to state my name - Tair. I have seen you at the latest Arctic Evening and thought you are the right to get a feedback from. Thanks!

You are right, there is no substance yet. We want to show the social network can be clean and simple to let users enjoy communication. No ads, no complexity, just the focus. We kind of expected the answers "whats the purpose" and "yet another network?", and we are ready to answer: "Keep using it, enjoy the simplicity and help us improve it, while we get the initial user base and bring up the basic features any other network has. In return you will get the "thing" what makes it different".