Yub.com: Welcome to the kitchen sink 25 Mar 2005

32 comments Latest by Snubbed By YUB!

Yub.com (“You Meet. You Hang. You Shop. We Send the Check.”) strives to bring together social networking (where all your friends are women), shopping, discount buying clubs, blogging, product reviews, and photosharing. I’m not kidding. And on top of all that, they’re bringing back the online mall shopping metaphor. I thought we were over that.

Oh, and continuing from Matt’s post about corporate speak, how about when a company tells you how to use their name?

“Yub” is buy spelled backwards, an apt name since we’re turning buying inside out by facilitating buying thru-friends and real people. Instead of buying what the stores tell you to buy, and then becoming a consumer, we flip it, allowing you to hear what the consumers say before you buy. Yub is also an acronym for our core user—the Young Urban Buyer.

Yuk.

32 comments so far (Jump to latest)

Keith 25 Mar 05

You know, there are parts of this metaphor I like, but most of it I could do without. It seems like there are so many online community services out there that are just way overdone. Where is the focus? Why is it always about the kitchen sink with this stuff?

Coudal 25 Mar 05

Double yuk. The whole thing feels like a high-school class project. “I know! We’ll spell it backwards! Awesome Becky! Check out this tagline, ‘You Meet. You Hang. You Shop. We Send the Check.’ We can have a Yub Club too. Wicked!”

Jayzuz, do you have to have an AOL email address to sign up or just a recent lobotomy?

JF 25 Mar 05

The more I look at this site the more I think one of two things.

1. They are insane.
2. I’ve totally missed the boat.

Bird 25 Mar 05

Check out the three “TV Spots” on the home page. All three are “professionals.” Professional surfer, professional wakeboarder, professional player.

I hope the yub.com folks have got it all wrong and yub.com is nothing more than a bad idea and not an indication of what’s on the horizon for us all.

Brian Breslin 25 Mar 05

i wonder how much they paid for that 3 letter domain? You gotta give them credit for trying this hard, after all those years of their CEO sinking so much cash into the business (whats his name? Scott Bloom right?) competing with Amazon.

What they need is big name partners like yahoo or ask.com to promote this shopping mall concept, can’t see google touching it with a ten foot pole though….

Jeni 25 Mar 05

Ah, that old e-commerce adage: if you can’t do one thing well, do several things poorly.

Bird 25 Mar 05

Kassia, the professional surfer, claims in her featured Yubmercial, “I use Yub.com to share my travel pics…” and stuff. On her profile page, she’s a member since December 13 and has posted a total of 0 travel pics. So, what is featured Yubber Kassia using yub.com for? Well, her most recent column, says “so we started a new” - that’s it - all 5 words. This is sad (me spending as long as I did looking at yub.com).

Yasuhisa 25 Mar 05

Gee, this looks familiar….
In Japan, there are several (I know at least 8) SNS looking like this. They all seems quite interesting at first, but I ended up with using Flickr (simple/focused) instead.

I guess it depends on people whether they have a focus/purpose or not. I’ve seen some people are more confortable with Yahoo than Google because Yahoo offers a lot of links/options… kind like TV.. you can receive information without thinking.

I don’t think the approach that Yub is taking is a good idea. Less features don’t mean less value.

Noah 25 Mar 05

There’s nothing more I enjoy as a person than being directly referred to as a “consumer” and a “user.” Way to yub that one upI

Noah 25 Mar 05

There’s nothing I enjoy more as a person than being directly referred to as a “consumer”, “buyer”, or “user”. Way to yub that one up.

Lee 25 Mar 05

The creators of this site are totally nuts. Did you read the history?
Avatarsing! Metailing, Shetailing, and Hetailing! Yubber Ducky!

Will 25 Mar 05

Brian - Scott Blum, not Bloom.
I met, long before Buy.com, when he and his dad had Pinnacle Micro ages ago.

I’m totally not surprised that he’s backing this. Which doesn’t mean it’s a good thing :)

Dan Boland 25 Mar 05

To paraphrase a line from the movie Mean Girls, “Quit trying to make “yub” happen.”

Ed Knittel 25 Mar 05

Oh, I’m good at these!

Yub is to Buy as tihs is to________?

Brian 25 Mar 05

Apparently they’re not all women, Renda is a piece of shit from South Park.

dave 25 Mar 05

Two notes:
1) When I first saw the way that YUB was announced on the Buy.com homepage, I was convinced it was some sort of joke, since the announcement looked so visually similar to the Amazon Prime announcement (with the CEO letter, and all), that it looked like a parody.
2) Oddly enough, whenever I’ve shopped Buy.com, I’ve had good experiences with pricing, shipping speed, and returns. So they are doing at least some things right.

Benjy 25 Mar 05

I wonder how much money Buy.com wasted on this…

lcreekmo 25 Mar 05

I can’t look anymore. It’s making me have awful flashbacks of several years ago. What are these people thinking?? [Worse, what if it works??]

Brian Breslin 26 Mar 05

of all the SNS, i’ve seen very few retain their cache after more than 6 months. Look at colleges as a microcosm of these things. First Friendster was all the rage, then it was boring. Then AIM’s different add-ons got people’s attention (still does, but now its more intrusive, i’m referring to the add-ons like buddy list and profile tools out there), then facebook.com (college kids know this one), now its MySpace.com. All of these are just generally targetted (although facebook does narrow itself down alot- which is good), and haven’t got the focus that Flickr has (even though flickr’s best feature is really its photo management/sharing vs social networking)

Casey Gollan 26 Mar 05

Something about this site yubs me the wrong way. It isn’t as yubtastic as Kassia said. I haven’t really tried yubbing yet but I’m not sure I want to after seeing the yubmercials. After looking at Kassia’s yub I was about to yub her saying “I yub you”, but I lost my nerve. Maybe the internet isn’t ready to start yubbing. Until the time comes, I hope all the current yubbers stay yubby and aren’t torn apart by the underlying e-commerce aspect.

This looks like something from web hell! I feel sorry for the guys who lost yubs and yubs of money on this. Take for example Monster.com, they didn’t have to call their job search page “Search the Monster’s Lair” to become a successful site. Maybe scrap it now and save yourself the trouble guys?

Casey Gollan 26 Mar 05

Just noticed this, they are the anti-signals!

On the feedback page:
“To date, we’ve built “a lot” of features that were recommended to us by users.”

What about less = more? Nah!

I challenge you to 37Better Yub! :-D

Leo 26 Mar 05

This is bad.

Chris S 26 Mar 05

It’s like someone giving you a computer that turns out to be a TRASH80.

They should’ve called it UBY and sold classic Scooby Doo merchandise.

All your yub are belong to us.

Meganwh 26 Mar 05

Yikes. I was getting flashbacks from old dot.com pitches, just reading the About section. We’re young! We’ve come up with a variation on X (insert name of successful website)! We’ve convinced someone to give us a lot of money! We’ll make meeellllionnnnnss!…

But the web design market certainly seems to be on an upswing, so I don’t think this will be the last of them. Also, stupid money is still money, and web designers have to eat…those contracts can be very lucrative, if annoying.

But don’t bother to 37Better them! They’ll be gone when the money runs out. And I’m sure Jason et al. have many better things to do…

ssabmud 26 Mar 05

How do you pronounce it? We pronounce it “Yuhb.” It rhymes with rub.

How is “yuhb” different than proncouncing it, “yub”?

Am I overlooking some mystical force that H has when inserted after vowels?

These guys are sdrater.

Casey Gollan 27 Mar 05

I believe the “H” is in there to create a kind of hawking sound like you’re making some spit. yuHHHHHHHb. I agree with you about not 37bettering it, :-D.

beto 29 Mar 05

Yum indeed, but…

�Yub� is buy spelled backwards, an apt name since we�re turning buying inside out…

1999 called, they want their dotcom business model back…

Anonymous Coward 08 Jun 05

Shhh, I’m yubbing

Snubbed By YUB! 15 Feb 06

My experience with YUB amounts to this: I made a purchase through YUB to one of the sponsored merchants amounting to a few thousand of dollars. Joined YUB to take advantage of the larger percentage of savings. At day 100, all points for the purchase are still pending.