MeStyle

Zyzlife was hacked some days ago, I fixed the site again and know how they did it, but for now I am not making the site online again for reasons I will describe here.

Zyzlife was an attempt to create a social network site where users could create their own social network sites. Zyzlife was the hub where you could go from site to site, the left menu would change depending on which network you where in. Users could create social network sites by dragging and dropping elements like forums, galleries, chat, html pages and so on, and you could also make your own design for each network. The reason I made it was that I already had two social networks Darkdate, a site for alternative people in Norway and Lolitasnap, a fashion site for people who like goth lolita, EGL and other Japanese styles. Lolitasnap had a very pink and cute design while Darkdate had varying black designs. The experiment worked very well with Lolitasnap that got more than 3000 new members and had a lot of activity (more than 5000 members). Darkdate is another story.

Darkdate was once a very active community with 18000 members and 3000 daily visitors, when I started working with it the activity had dropped enormously, I attributed the fact to Facebook, the general drop in the number of alternative people in Norway and the fact that Darkdate was a very old fashioned social network site. It didn’t have forums, communities, you had to pay to have more than 5 pictures in the gallery and the coding was done in Norwegian. My goal was always to create a new more modern Darkdate. The problem was that the drop in daily visitors was so extreme that I launched the new site way too early, I was afraid that no one would be left when I made the new site, since in just one year the daily activity had dropped from 3000 to 700. Half of the drop came before I started working with the site. The new site was full of bugs, navigational issues and other flaws, and we had some problems transferring information since everything was coded in Norwegian. It was a big mistake of me launching it that early and the reaction I got on it was not pretty.

I kept working on Zyzlife for 2 more years, and in the end I was actually very happy with the result, the site had 30.000 members and some really cool features that no other social network sites have, but it still needs a lot of work, Facebook is a difficult network to compete with and I have other projects that are more successful at least money-wise. Zyzlife has always been my pet project and I spent a lot of money on it, but it is just too much work for me alone with very little returns.

I am thinking about making Zyzlife an open source project or a collaboration project so if anyone is interested in working with me on this let me know.