Jumo launched yesterday with much fanfare, and NonProfitTrends, Amy Sample Ward, and Beth Kanter are among those with useful observations. I love the idea – “Jumo is a social network connecting individuals and organizations who want to change the world” – but it seems like a tough move to build an entirely new platform when so many people are already embedded elsewhere (Facebook, Change.org, and Idealist are obvious examples). Just offering a better, more social sector-optimized version of Facebook (despite Facebook’s mediocre execution) may not be enough to overcome the gravitational pull of 600 million users or even the established communities at other nonprofit-oriented sites. And offering largely redundant functionalities with a wide range of reported problems isn’t going to make it any easier. I suspect for Jumo to earn a critical mass of credibility and user loyalty they’ll need to clean up their implementation issues (obviously), but I suspect they’ll also need to offer a platform that does something dramatically different and better than its many competitors.
For the record, I don’t yet have a Jumo account because it’s rejected every attempt I’ve made to create one. I’m sure I’ll get in eventually.