My friend Guillaume (I recommend to visit his blog on the hospitality industry) made me aware of that networking site.
Whereas sites like Linkedin or openBC are generalists, wiwih is "vertical" and specialized in the Hospitality industry.
General vs Specialized
It leads to the very same topic of general vs specialized. What do you think?
Usually, the business models of social&business Networking websites are focused on the number of registered members: volume of contacts/members is very important.
In that case, Hsyndicate is specialized in the Hospitality industry.
I plan to register and test the interface soon.
General vs. Specialised is a really interesting question. In an Business Week article (http://yahoo.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2006/tc20060227_274552.htm) Nate Elliot, an Jupiter Research Analyst "is more enthusiastic about the prospect of niche-oriented networks" like TripConnect etc. On the other hand, an investor of OpenBC said to me that the future belongs to general interest SNS (maybe with channels and groups related to different topics). He pointed out that nobody wants to register, login and update data of 10 or 20 SNS.
Regards from Austria,
Andreas
Posted by: Andreas Stradner | March 21, 2006 at 14:47