Mightybell

By Jill Duffy

In the drive to create the next great online social network, the former CEO of Ning, Gina Bianchini, threw her hat into the ring with Mightybell?(free), a site where you create "spaces," similar to Pinterest boards, and invite friends to collaborate on them.?

Mightybell's problems start with incomplete features, continue into half-baked visuals, and end with bugs. Even though its concept is solid, Mightybell is not a network I recommend anyone use, at least until the bugs are fixed.

Because Mightybell doesn't cost a dime, you can explore it risk-free (barring the cost of your time) to see you can bend it to your needs. And at times it seems like it could?except of course for the bugs.

Features
Similar to Pinterest's boards, Mightybell lets you create spaces. Each space can have its own purpose: a name, description, color theme, and group of collaborators who can use the space to discuss or further the purpose. For example, I set up a Mightybell pages for a Lunch Club that I run at PCMag, in which some of my colleagues and I head out to one of the neighborhood's finer restaurants a few times a year. I had hoped the Mightybell space might become a centralized area where we could pick the date of future outings, discuss new restaurants, and save copies of menus to help us pick where to eat.

The site lets you invite people to join your space, and you the space owner or administrator can control whether other members have the ability to post content, or comment on existing comment, or only see what's in the space without interfering it in. So far, so good.

The kinds of content you can collect to the board appear at the top: post, photo, question, video, link, file, and event. The question isn't any different from the post, unfortunately, with no options for multiple choice answers or voting. How bland. One additional way to post content is by using a bookmarklet, which is daringly similar to Pinterest's bookmarklet. Add it to your browser bookmark bar, and click it when you land on a Web page and want to "pin" something from it, like an image, to one of your Mightybell spaces. One nice addition that Pinterest doesn't offer is the ability to pin a screenshot of the whole page, which helps enormously for saving pages that don't use a single image to convey their significance. Both sites, however, get befuddled by Flash. I initiated the board by writing a post with a list of restaurants where we had already dined, creating an "event" with the time and date of the next proposed Lunch Club get-together, and "pinned" or attached PDF menus of new restaurants for future lunches. All in all, things seemed okay.

Once I convinced a few fellow lunch clubbers to join, however, we all began to report similar problems. The site stalled a lot, often when one us tried to add anything, like a comment or a mere "cheer" (similar to Facebook's "like") to a post. Three of us hit frustrating stall-outs in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.

Another problem is the inability to reorder content once you get it into your space. (And permit me to complain that Pinterest has the same annoying problem.) For my Lunch Club space, I wanted to put menus and the date of the next lunch first where people would see it quickly. But Mightybell sticks your post in reverse-chronological order (newest post first) without giving you any means for changing the order.

The more I tried to edit and manage my space, the more road blocks I hit. Folders, which you can create by compiling posts together (as in a "menus" folder) can't be deleted once they're created. If you accidentally hit the button to create a new space, there's no way to cancel it. You have to finish creating it, then delete, so hopefully you'll figure out where the delete button is hiding (it took me more than a few very tiring minutes).

Not Resounding
Mightybell has a relatively good concept, but very weak execution. In a field as competitive as online social networks, it's far behind any of the big names. Explore it if you like?it's free?but expect to hit many frustrating obstacles.

For slightly serious collaborative efforts (and by "serious," I mean for projects that aren't purely aimed at entertainment and socializing), Asana (free, 4 stars) offers a wonderful selection of tools and supports up to 30 members on a single account for free. Be forewarned that Asana is more of a task-management tool, so it works more like project management software than a socially collaborative website. Pinterest would be a good fit for less serious collaboration, but even it is far from perfect. Facebook Groups are another option?at least most of your contacts will already have accounts there, so you won't need to convince anyone to sign up for a new service. You could get old-school and create a Wiki, although they can be messy and hard to manage. Social networks build a lot of order into the chaos that Wikis once were.

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