Yesterday Ziggs.Com was the hottest trend on Google. This surprised me! As it is kind of a very over staturated market. You already have Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn etc. It is a bit confusing to why it was so popular yesterday, but that might have something to do with some press releases.
What is Ziggs.Com?
In my humble opinion it is a site to try to control the search results for your name, which comes at a cost ($4.95 /month). There is a lot more. They provide a free profile for you like Facebook but meant to be more professional, elegant and in your control. It alerts to when, how, and the location of who is looking at your Ziggs profile. Then there is the money making side of things. You can buy people Starbuck’s gift certificates etc. Book travel and make payments on things and buy other stuff. There is an empathise on job advertising, though recruiters and employers probably don’t have the time to hunt for people.
The official line is:
Ziggs is for the Internet user who proactively wants to market themself on the Web – to be found by recruiters, to find a better job, or just to be found when searched for. Ziggs is also for the Internet user who wants to develop or participate in private online communities with colleagues, friends, club members or charity teams.
Why Ziggs?
It is meant to provide the elegant professional profile, but www.linkedin.com already does a good job of that. I would guess it is for people who want to know about who is Googleing them. The problem of course is that for your profile to be on top of the Google listings you have to pay the $US4.95 / month and have it in the yellow Google Ads section of the search results. To get the alerts the person has to click on your Ziggs profile. Of course there is the wonderful services you but like Starbucks Gift Certificates to spend at the local Starbucks that use to be around the corner from you now completely empty.
When would you use Ziggs?
I guess their arguement is, always. They try to say it is all about when you have someone Googleing you, you want to have the most glowing profile possible. Truth is you probably can get away with your LinkedIn profile for the time being.
Summary
Ziggs.com is not worth the effort or money. You want to get your name to the top of a search engine, go on and blog a lot, post repsonse to blogs, and have a good LinkedIn profile. Real-time alerts might also be depressing when you go 6 months without an alert. It really is a affiliates marketing webstie dressed up as social-networking site.
