Most nights, Joshua Dziabiak and Lynsie Camuso can be found huddled together at Pittsburgh's Tuscany Caf… polishing Showclix.com, a new Internet social networking community for people like them - live-music lovers who have had it with MySpace.
An online watering hole and place to swap tickets for music devotees and the bands they love, Showclix is among the next wave of cozier, sometimes-exclusive social networks flooding the Internet.
It and another Pittsburgh-area-based site, Qlique, that is expected to launch this week, in some ways are a backlash against their celebrated ancestors, MySpace and Facebook, popular online meeting places for teens and collegians that former users say have become overcrowded with strangers, unwanted solicitations and distractions they could care less about.
Many former devotees of such popular sites are gravitating toward what has become one of the hottest segments of the online networking community - more intimate Internet gathering grounds for people with something in common, such as shared interests or similar backgrounds. It may be the decade in which they were born; motherhood or fatherhood; or a love for hiking, the outdoors - even games. For example, Qlique, created by the Web firm Entermedia, aims to bring blackjack, poker and other online entertainment to the college crowd.
If MySpace and Facebook wowed the business world in the past year, commanding buyout offers in the half-billion-dollar range and up, the younger, cozier generation of online camps aims to make its fortune by bringing together and making like-minded audiences happy. These include Gather.com, self-described as "geared toward the National Public Radio set," and 55-Alive, targeted toward baby boomers.
The strategy appears to have some legs in the investment community. Geni.com, a Web community centered around genealogy, recently was valued at $100 million by investors. And last year, venture capitalists poured nearly $700 million into Web sites with a social bent, double 2005 levels, according to DowJones VentureOne research.
Such stratospheric price tags have some bloggers and dot-com survivors wondering if the Web's second generation looks a little too much like the first, when many dot-coms, lacking revenue, customers and sometimes a solid business plan, landed loads of money anyway, sometimes only to ultimately crash and burn.
For ambitious dot-coms a decade ago, the path to success led to venture capitalists with lots of cash, clout and connections. That's still true, but today's dot-coms know that faceless, nameless bloggers also matter - and wield the power to make or break a Web site.
A mention on the right blog can clear the path for hundreds of thousands of new users to a Web site - and potentially prompt investors to come knocking. Adoring bloggers helped push along another Pittsburgh-area site, HumbleVoice.com, an online hub for artists to promote and share their work that Dziabiak helped launch last year with co-founder Jon Dean.
"I think bloggers are starting to realize the power they possess in the online space," Camuso said.
As they put the final touches on Showclix before it went live in early March, the duo courted music blogs and tech blogs with little success. But they have benefited from an e-mail sent to about 100 family and friends, urging them to check out the site, blog about it and pass it along. They credit the e-mail with spreading the word about Showclix, which has picked up 6,500 members so far this month.
They are hoping that in time, investment dollars will follow. Until then, the pair are keeping their day jobs at the Web firm where they met. And at the close of each business day, they head out to work on Showclix.
The site will keep growing, Camuso claims, because she and Dziabiak have created a unique slice of the Web. It's the only place where upstart and independent musicians can connect with music fans, sell tickets to their shows and discover and share new music in one place. "No one has done it successfully," she said.
