Another week shows another name throwing their cap into the ring for the purpose of the online buddy business. You might think that the presence of myspace means that this particular avenue might be sewn up tight but if you’ve wandered round myspace of late then for many the cracks are starting to appear. With seventy million plus users on the books (and that’s a lot of couch ridden kids to contend with) the site is understandably starting to feel the strain. Downtime is commonplace and certain features aren’t always available. In a sense its understandable considering the constant pressure the site is under, but for an impatient user that’s precious little consolation. Then of course there is the content itself, badly coded pages are commonplace. It seems a little HTML in the wrong hands can be a truly dangerous thing. The pages wind up looking something from an acid derived nightmare and there can be so many movies embedded into any one page that it can take forever for them to load.

So what could Tagworld introduce to a concept that may just be starting to smell a little bit past its prime?

Tagworld is essentially another Internet startup company competing directly with myspace under the premise that it offers a more customisable experience than its competitor. Unlike myspace however Tagworld is powered by Web 2.0 which is designed to give the end user a greater degree of control over their content (I find descriptions of what Web 2.0 actually is somewhat vague to be honest). As a whole the overall appearance of Tagworld “out of the box” is a lot smoother than its myspace counterpart. The music player looks a little more up to date and can be launched as a separate standalone web application as opposed to being an embedded part of your page. There are also quite a few templates for the individual to play with in order to customise their page. So far myspace users have been reliant on the good graces of more proficient coders to create and host templates. The site boasts comprehensive search facilities for browsing users as does myspace (but comprehensive doesn’t always sit well with “ease of use”). Blogs and photo uploads are of course par for the course and are roughly comparable with their counterpart.

When it comes to actually running the site there are some things that need to be taken into account. For starters don’t even think about trying to run the site on a narrowband connection. There are times when the site can bring even a fast connection to a near stall. Most of the problem seems to come into play while your media player is loading so non musician profiles might escape this problem, catch the site on a good day and things feel acceptable, anything less than optimal conditions though and Tagworld becomes little bit like wading through treacle.

Actual navigation across the site is done via a series of tabbed panes. It all seems well meaning enough but in execution the navigation process becomes a little unwieldy and for want of a better word “clunky”. Let’s say someone requests being added as a friend; actually finding the page where you can respond to them can become a chore in itself. That’s just one example where the site tends to overcomplicate itself. One area where the site does win points is the way it lets you track who has been visiting your site which is something that myspace have actively dissuaded its users from doing (myspace made alterations to the site to knock out third party “tracking” code which some of its users were using). Of course the issue of tracking site visitors is a contentious one, but in light of recent “grooming” scares on a number of youth orientated sites it is one that needs to be addressed.

It might sound like I’m doing something of a hatchet job on the site and in fairness I’ll concede Tagworld is relatively young (not long out of Beta) but some of these issues should have been tied up before the site got to this stage.

Tagworld does offer quite a sense of style and for that matter a competitive set of features. But under the hood there is still work that need doing if it is ever going to become anything resembling a threat to myspace. Add to this the fact that its competing against an installed user base on the other services. (It will have to amass another 69 million users to catch myspace).

This time it could be a case of too little, too late.