Ecirkit .com

eCirkit bills itself as a social networking site for "artists, speed- and thrill-seekers, non-conformists, [and] extremophiles of every variety." It's extreme all right--extremely lame. (See "The Right Social Network for You" for a look at other social networking sites.)

The idea is that once you join eCirkit, you'll never have to go anywhere else. The site is designed around a Web desktop or "Webtop"--a single page that lets you access your photos, videos, blogs, RSS feeds, bookmarks, instant messaging, contacts, and even a minibrowser. Meanwhile, its Social Penetrator applet (complete with power-drill icon) drills into your eBay, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube accounts and pulls your pictures, videos, and other shared information into your eCirkit profile. (You may want to compare eCirkit with the aggregation-focused Flock browser.)

The service is easy enough to set up and use, but the result looks like AOL circa 1989--a series of cluttered, overlapping windows and crude widgets. For example, the Penetrator won't automatically update your eCirkit page, so if you add new information to your Facebook profile, you have to repenetrate. Worse, opening different parts of the site in multiple windows (so as to see more of those overlapping windows) slowed both Firefox and IE to a crawl and eventually caused both browsers to crash.

eCirkit has the usual social networking stuff--you can connect with other eCirkit users and leave comments on their photos and videos, and so on. But this network doesn't appear to be well populated. A broad search turned up roughly 8000 profiles; many, however, appear to be dummy or inactive accounts.

The site does have some innovative features. Its ads, which are more like corporate logos than banner ads, fade subtly into the background of each window, and you can choose which companies' logos you want to see. Every user gets a Vault with 1GB of free storage, so you can access files from any machine or share them with others. eCirkit serves up the usual warnings about avoiding copyright violations, but does nothing to prevent you from illegally swapping files of copyrighted music or movies.

Yet the most remarkable thing about eCirkit is its cockiness. "In the ecosystem of life, there are sheep, and there are wolves. Which one are you?" The home page asks. That's a surprising question from a site that's just an ordinary mutt.

--Dan Tynan