Qype - Live and tell

Are users of some social networks fed up of being ‘bitten’, ‘poked’ and having sheep thrown at them? That’s the question put forward by the Beeb’s tech programme BBC Click this week.

According to the programme a new breed of social networks are closing in on the likes of Facebook and MySpace, offering something more than “just a glorified friend finder”.

The BBC very nicely chose to include Qype in their group of ’socially useful sites’ and yours truly even makes a brief appearance in the programme to explain a little bit about how Qype works.

The feature looks at the rise of practical, people-powered sites as well as asking the usual questions about the possible abuse of user-generated content (owners hyping up their businesses for example), and the future of data portability across different networks.

You can watch the whole programme on this page (or just read the text version if you prefer). The story also made the front age of Digg so there’s a conversation going on on that site too.

As always, let us know what you think in the comments.

Our glorious leader, Stephan Uhrenbacher, was recently interviewed by the Guardian Unlimited for their digital content blog.

Stephan answered a few question for the blog’s ‘Elevator Pitch’ feature, explaining what Qype’s all about, how the site began, and his plans for the future.

He also shares some of the stranger experiences he’s had since forming Qype, including the bizarre tale of the ‘Fun Factory’:

Something weird but remarkable happened to Andrew and Phil, two British members of the Qype team. The two guys share a flat in Hamburg and whenever they have guests to stay from the UK, the visitors tend to review their stay on Qype.

We were quite surprised when a band manager called from Munich saying his group would be coming through Hamburg and that they wanted to play the ‘The Fun Factory’. Even though this is a private home, Andrew and Phil have agreed to host ‘Commando’ and have invited a group of Qypers to the gig at the Fun Factory in February.

There’s even an arty, black and white shot of the man himself (taken at our Christmas party!).

You can read the rest of the interview right here.

There’s an interesting article over at Web2.0 gossip site Techcrunch UK about the clubber’s networking site Don’t Stay In.

TCUK calls the community ‘the biggest social networking site you’ve never heard of’ and it does seem that the clubbing fraternity have really embraced it and turned it something pretty useful.

If you read the post you’ll see Qype gets mentioned as a competitor to Don’t Stay In, and while that’s not entirely accurate (although you can check out our club reviews here), there’s some definite similarities, and it’s great to see another local/social community like this really finding its niche and helping out its users.

So do any Qype users also use Don’t Stay In? Is there one thing they do that makes them great? Could we learn anything from them? Let us know in the comments.