****Lycos Gets Personal
Newsbytes - August 19, 1998 13:56
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WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A., 1998 AUG 19 (NB) -- By Bob Woods, Newsbytes. Lycos Inc. [NASDAQ:LCOS] is the latest World Wide Web portal concern to offer personal Web pages for its users. These pages, though, are designed to be a quick and easy way to put up short announcements or fan pages on the Web.
While Lycos' most recent effort does offer a categorization scheme, it lacks one aspect contained in recent initiatives from Excite Inc. [NASDAQ:XCIT] and Yahoo Inc. [NASDAQ:YHOO] -- the idea of communities or neighborhoods.
Lycos is touting its personalized Web site feature as a service "that allows users to quickly and easily create personalized engagement, wedding and birth announcements via the Internet." The announcements are designed to fit into one page, and are described as a "reliable and free alternative to the traditional newspaper announcement."
Lycos will also offer users the chance to build resumes, sports and celebrity fan pages. Those Web sites will be stored in galleries that can be accessed by Lycos visitors.
Specific pre-built templates are available for six different types of announcements: personal pages, celebrity fan pages, sports fan pages, resume pages, baby pages and wedding pages.
While Lycos-sold advertising does not currently appear on any of the Web pages already created by members, a company spokesperson said that Lycos would be selling such space "shortly."
Announcements made earlier this week by Excite and Yahoo were centered around the aspect of community or neighborhoods (Newsbytes, Aug. 17 and 18, 1998, respectively). Excite said last Monday it would let Netizens build their own "neighborhood"-like areas that can even be shut off to outsiders. "Excite Communities" allows Web surfers to build customized Internet communities, and lets members of the cyber-neighborhoods "wall" themselves off from the rest of the world by not listing their groups in the Excite Community Directory.
Excite Community users can also determine the focus of their communities, rather than having people find a neighborhood category into which to move, Excite also said. Excite's new service is in beta testing; the full service will launch with populated communities for viewing and joining later this fall, Excite added.
And yesterday, Yahoo said its new "Yahoo Clubs" provides a "unique Web address and centralized Web communications center for groups to develop relationships and interact on a regular basis with friends, relatives, co-workers and other people who share similar interests."
Yahoo is targeting a variety of groups, including workgroup hubs, business-to-business concerns, families, investment clubs, associations, fan clubs and alumni organizations with its new offering.
Like Excite, Yahoo also permits a neighborhood to become a private cyber-gated community.
Lycos' announcements/fan page service only allows people to list their particular Web sites within any of the six categories. But Lycos does have a separately branded community service through its recently acquired Tripod (Newsbytes, Feb. 3, 1998). When Lycos bought Tripod, Tripod's community claimed 1 million members, and was targeted at the 18- to 34-year old crowd. Lycos pitches to its portal users Tripod's "pods" or areas.
Reacting to yesterday's Yahoo announcement, Patrick Keane, Jupiter Communications analyst, said he expected other Web portal companies to follow with personal Web site variations of their own. "They usually play 'follow the leader when it comes to service offerings," he said.
Overall, Keane said he thought the portals' new community strategy was a good one, "in terms of keeping people on their Web sites and building loyalty to those sites."
Keane said he was not sure if advertisers would take to the idea like Web surfers probably will. "Is a huge brand going to want to put their brand name on top of amateur content? I'm not so sure," he said. But he added that marketers would probably like the demographic targeting capabilities such specialized groups would bring to ad campaigns.
Reported By Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com .
11:47 CST <BR>Reposted 15:51 CST
(19980819/Press Contacts: Brigitte LaMarche, Lycos, 781-370-2688; Bill Keeler, Schwartz Communications, 781-684-0770 /WIRES ONLINE, BUSINESS/LYCOS/PHOTO)
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