Disappointing - Practicum 7 - Cara

I am extremely disappointed with the lack of action that is occurring on the Jewish social networking site I joined. I try and sign onto Shmooze at least once a week to maintain my presence on the website but I am constantly displeased with what the site has to offer. I have taken some time away from the site because of the Holidays and I decided to log back on today.... only to be disappointed.

I think that the website is a total failure because of the low amount of users it has. Jewish computer users are not finding any need to join Shmooze because it does not offer anything they can't find elsewhere. I feel that most of my Jewish friends are active Facebook users and do not feel the need to join an exclusively Jewish social networking site. I also think that J-date, the website, is the number one used site by Jews who are looking for romantic relationships with other Jews. J-date is an exclusively Jewish website that does extremely well. It has a ton of members and a huge success rate in matching Jews with other Jews. Shmooze manages to fall in between and serve no real purpose to a Jewish computer user who is getting their social networking fix on other sites.

I have not had anyone on the website reach out to me which I think is my number one concern. The number of people on the website has also not grown since I have joined which does not surprise me. After finding nothing notable on the site, I decided to take a look at the photos on this website so that I could compare them to the photos I had been looking at on the Judaism Facebook page. There was a lot of nature shots and personal photos of the users. There was a bunch of pictures of Israel and of Israeli soldiers. It was definitely nicer to look through the photos on Shmooze as compared to the ones on the Facebook page. These photos seem to be more personal and meaningful as compared to the hateful and racist photos I found on the other page.

In conclusion, I will be deactivating my Shmooze account as soon as this project is over because I feel that being a member serves no purpose to me. I think that joining Jewish groups on Facebook, a site I regularly use, is a much more practical way to get involved with other Jewish users because there is a large ACTIVE Jewish population on Facebook and not on Shmooze.