Library clips

The idea of Fanpop is to create a topic portal composed of many modules, and what do you know, your fanpop topic becomes part of a social system, where you can share and discover other fanpops (spots)…most similar service is Zimbio, although, Fanpop is more focused on social networking.

Let’s break down other web 2.0 services that focus on specific modules, whereas fanpop condenses them all in the one dashboard.

Topic/List sites
- Squidoo
- H20 Playlist
- Hubpages

Public RSS Readers
- SuprGlu
- Feedpile
- Feed Collectors
- Kinja, and the rest

Startpages (public version)
- PageFlakes
- Protopage
(these pages contain lots of different modules to make up a great topic page, actually PageFlakes has a ripping full-fledged RSS Reader),

Social bookmark groups
- Shadows
- Jots
- Connotea
- ma.gnolia, etc

Tag based forums
- Vennt and others

Wiki’s
- there are lots and lots

Blogs
- there are lots and lots…Gather is interesting, so is CommonGate

Q&A
- Otavo (Q&A with topic list features…FAQQLY isn’t quite a topic based Q&A)

Personal Content Managers
- Ziki
(I guess start pages and Public RSS Readers and Identity Managers like claimID and Naymz are similar)

What Group or Topic Content Managers like Fanpop attempt to do is encompass all these modules under the one umbrella, but also make room to receive re-syndicated content…startpages do basically the same thing, but they are not in a social setting, and have a more broad use.

I’m not too sure it is going to trump Zimbio in Topic-based Social Content Management (Zimbio even has all its modules displayed in a start page, and has OPML)
…another similar tool is Complore and GROU.PS, these are both web 2.0 tools, but not as social in a networked way.

Features

There are heaps of Spots (Fanpops), they are organised into a category list (channels).

Links tab
- add a link, tag it, and also choose type of link eg. blog, forum, video, audio, etc…
- leave comments
- rate links
(When you click on a link it opens within Fanpop, ie. each link has a permalink…this way you don’t have to leave Fanpop to view a link…this type of feature is portal-like, in contrast to a gateway list of links).

Headlines tab
- re-syndicated feeds (doesn’t reveal feed sources)

Forum tab

Fans tab
- links to users who subscribe to a spot

Related Spots
- generates a list of related spots

More on the web
- a place for your favourite links

Personal area

Aggregates links you have rated

Aggregates links you have contributed
- filter this content by type (content type) and by tag (keyword)

Spots you have joined and created
- also see a running stream of links from your spots, see mine.
- filter this content by type (content type) and by tag (keyword)

Fans that have subscribed to your spots (Spots you have created)

Messages

Fanpop is really easy to use, it’s a great tool for communal topic creating, plus the social networking aspect is on par with the best.

Check the web 2.0 spot for some Fanpop action, see the blog for more.