Hubze is a newcomer - who claims to connect the most famous Social media networking websites & Instant messengers under one umbrella for free. Hubze has started to promote its website just by recruiting new members with the help of its members.At the moment there are just a few webinar videos available and promotional material. The videos sound very attractive (yeah, it's a commercial, won't hear anything bad in it, mind you) to a lot of members which reflects itself in the fast rising number of members (after 1 week more than 4.000 members, after 2 1/2 weeks already 13.000 members, goal of the website owner is 100.000 members in late May).
My Conclusion:
Here are some reasons why you should kind of critical towards their website.
- In the first week the name of the website was announced with Moneza, they changed it after the second week to Hubze. Their reason written in their blog was to reflect that the website is more a hub for all other Social media networking websites than a money-making opportunity without any additional information how to make money with their system (which was reflected by the word Moneza and with which they could attract 4.000 members in the beginning).
- Only screenshots are available from their Hubze cards which shall include the famous social media websites + Instant Messengers (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FlickR, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube, WordPress, Blogger, Feedburner, Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and many more!).
You will find on your Hubze card the recent live status updates from your registered social media websites. The feature of Geo-targeting will be available, too (famous from Foursquare). - No word about the safety of your data if you allow them to post your status updates from these Social Media networks to your Hubze cards. We just have to remember which problems Twitter and Facebook had in the last weeks with hacked accounts, fake e-mails, trojans and virus which have been sent to us by DM or e-mail.
- When i signed up in the second week, i didn't use a referral link but i still got referred to Hubze by David Foster. Only after the sign-up process i saw in the blog posts that David Foster is the CEO of this new company. This was one of the signs for me that it's not such an ethical company when the CEO tries to get as much referrals as possible in his private account. Later they told in one of the webinar videos about their Affiliate program which shall be a 2-Tier program. This means you might get a commission from your direct referral and a portion from the referral of your direct referral. At the moment this practice has stopped but he definitely got a lot of sign-ups under his name from the first weeks.
- It seems more to be a website for Internet and Affiliate marketers as the founders are from this business sector and most of the comments on the blog are from those marketers, too. Another reason why you could get swamped over with this kind of persons will be because Hubze will only allow advertisement from within their community.
The question is if their calculation for their premium membership for 29,97$/month (additional a blog inside their Hubze card + Auto responder service) + for 37, 67 & 297 $ (one time fees) a fully customized Facebook Fan page will be enough to cover the costs for 100.000s of FREE Hubze cards or if they have to turn additional towards paid advertisement around the Hubze cards. - Their affiliate program could be not so member-friendly like promised in the first weeks. At the end of the webinar of 29th March 2010 Mike Healy answered to a question "who would be eligible for a commission from the affiliate programs". His answer was that it's most likely that you have to upgrade for some services to enjoy a commission from that particular service from your referrals.
This means you could "loose" a big amount of income as for the monthly premium membership the commission will be between 15% (4.49 $/month) and 45% (13.48 $/month) for the direct referrals and 5 - 9% (1.49 - 2.69 $) for their referrals (this depends how many of your referrals upgrade to premium, 45% is only achievable if 100 referrals upgrade in that particular month!).
For the customized Facebook page you would earn 10% (3.70 - 29.70 $ - direct referral) or 5% (1.85 - 14.85 $ - referral of your direct referral) of the sales prices (37 - 297$)
My Conclusion:
If they can fulfill what they promise in their video commercial by taking care of safety risks and advertisements, it could get a great website to share your status updates in ONE place & connect with a lot of new persons (and simply forget about earning a bunch of money like Mike Healy announces on his blog with 10.000 $ weekly *lol*)!
New connections & friends might be more worth for your future than a few missed bucks.
In case you like what you saw in the video, feel free to register with Hubze, so that you are one of the first to enjoy their service when they will launch their Hubze cards!
I signed up for Hubze, back when it was Moneza and was preparing to write a blog post (and perhaps build my own downstream), but then I started looking a little more closely, so I've held back. I've had a bunch of similar concerns as you've raised. On top of that, even without those concerns, I'm not sure what they really add. The Hubze Card seems to be pretty much the same as what dandyid or or retaggr is already doing.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, their focus on webcasts and their lack of much else to show further compounds my concerns. So, for the time being, I'm holding off. Maybe I'm missing a great MLM opportunity, but I too uncomfortable with them to jump in yet.