Lycos Joins the Social Networking Fray

Lycos U.S. Changes...Everything

Wow. Not suprising..but the first big portal to make such a public shift in strategy. Will the paid subscription model that they espouse work? Probably not. Friendster is going to run into similar problems.

The one interesting piece here is that Lycos will be able to use its large active user base to develop a better understanding of what "clusters" of friends are intrerested in and are searching on (hopefully giving them better CPM advertising numbers). From what I know, Google is trying to do a similar thing with Orkut - building better searches by tapping into your social network to figure out what others you know are interested in.

There's another company that's trying to do this called Eurekster.

Stay tuned.