WebProNews

From the beginning the social network craze was fueled by the young. The Next Big Thing often is. But as those Next Big Things become household names, the inevitable is occurring: grownups and youngsters are reminded they don't always get along so well.

The young crowd is looking around the MySpace party and wondering who called the cops (and their parents). The older crowd (and by older, I mean the 30-somethings and above) strut into Facebook only to feel like the creepy old guy dancing by himself at the club.

When MySpace got so much attention in 2005, I had a hunch that it would be much like the local teen hangout, and that once the adults showed up something would have to give. It's like that time your dad, wearing his sandals and black socks, thought MC Hammer was "a pretty radical dude." Time to start listening to Pearl Jam, instead.

Of course, I'm showing my own age with that reference. But something interesting is happening instead. When Facebook opened up beyond colleges, MySpacers flocked to it but did not abandon MySpace. They began maintaining two accounts, the young ones still complaining that their parents, the cops, their teachers, prospective employers, and now advertisers were watching them.

Everybody was in cahoots to take advantage of the information available, and, unfortunately for the youth, the part of the brain that predicts the consequences of actions develops last. Cue the firings, the controversies, the embarrassments, and the fun-making.

Cue also platforms that address these very issues.

I also predicted once that more targeted, niche networks would be the wave of the future, a prediction I thought I was wrong about as Facebook rocketed just like MySpace while LinkedIn stagnated, but it maybe I was just early. 2008 may prove my prediction right.

I heard about Moli.com in an unusual way. I heard about it through Twitter (great concept, useful, fun, great potential, lots of annoying outages) when Marketing Pilgrim's Andy Beal, a person I follow on Twitter, introduced it:

Another social network - www.moli.com - anyone else think of Austin Powers? "MOLI, MOLI, MOLI"

After the required reminiscing about that classic scene, and the obligatory reliving of just how horrid a large Scotsman can make both a turtlehead and a rosebud, I took a look.

I hear about new social networks all the time, and am rarely impressed enough to cover them. But Moli, just on a visual level was striking to me for some reason, much more than MySpace or Facebook ever was. That may be because I'm part of the Moli target market: 30-something, upwardly mobile, not interested in throwing imaginary food at my digital friends.

The second thing I noticed was that users can manage multiple profiles with multiple privacy settings. They can set up a public or private profile for business, one for family, one for friends, and if they don't want their business associates or family nosing around their social life or even for them to know they have a social networking profile, they can set it to invisible, invitation only.

Voila. There can be two or three separate yous just like in real life. "Jenny" is the Tom of Moli, everybody's first friend, just less of a…never mind...and keeps members informed of what's happening.

The third thing I noticed was featured member Jamie B., who is the exact right blend of sexy and scary, much like many of my ex-girlfriends (note the profile pic of her with a bleeding heart in her hand), who were, if Sheryl Crow will forgive me, my favorite mistakes. Jamie B. would have been a wonderfully convenient interview subject about Moli.com (my wife's not reading this, is she?), but she apparently had better (presumably scarier and sexier) things to do than answer my poke. Ahem, I mean message.

I should have contacted Elka instead, who wants to be a stuntwoman.  

I did manage to get a hold of Moli president and COO Judy Balint, who took a breath during last week's DEMO conference to give me a quick overview. Ms. Balint has some experience with successful web ventures, she and the CEO, Dr. Christos M. Cotsakos, brought the world E*TRADE, which you may have heard of. It's probably also why they had no trouble grabbing nearly $30 million in the latest funding round.

Ms. Balint says the name Moli wasn't Austin Powers-inspired, but rather a hybrid of the words "money" and "living," and was envisioned as a place for people  "entering that next major lifestyle change beginning in the late twenties." Unlike when in college, young professionals are a bit more concerned about controlling the information available out there about them.

And nobody under 18 is allowed.

And you can make a store there for 4 bucks a month, no commission, PayPal and Google Checkout accepted.   

Moli has other revenue models as well, which is more than MySpace and Facebook thought of when they launched, and they're still struggling to find good ones. At Moli, the first profile URL is free, and each additional one—you know, the ones for the secret yous—are $1.99 per month. Don't want to be bothered by advertising? An ad-free experience is available for $2.49 per month.

Balint assures me that there should be no privacy concerns since Moli shares the information they collect with members via a platform called CoVibe, which all members can access or post on their profile for free. This is supposed to be the same basic information Moli gives to advertisers: total profile page views, percentage of men and women visiting, their average ages broken down by gender, visitor states and countries, percentage of visitors from businesses, the total number visiting your profile this moment.

A more detailed, printable profile report, of course, can be purchased, so members can see every bit of information kept about them, and use it for their own purposes as well. Ms. Balint uses the example of someone trying to get a book published. They could use the information from their profile to support their case that they grab a specific market segment.

Moli has what it should have to be up-to-date: Ajax, blogs, message boards, RSS feeds, video players, audio players, games, media slideshows, and event calendars. But it also has an in-house publishing staff and video crew that create content for the site as well as ads for advertisers. The video crew produces video profiles of interesting Moli members, called Moli Rollers, like the one created about art professor Bill Sanchez.

In other words, this is one pretty complete social network whose principals have paid pretty close attention to the woes of MySpace and Facebook. A new prediction, then, is in order: Moli will do pretty well out there.