There's more to life than just Myspace

YOU'D HAVE thought that after News Corp bought Myspace, its smaller rivals would have packed their bags and gone home. Not so.

New free communities are still arriving - like Jiglu. Plus there's a mobile friendly community in Itsmy.com

Itsmy.com. claims to be the biggest free mobile content community in existence. To date, it appears to have 1.7 million users and have offered 2.7 million downloads.

It supports picture uploads (MMS) and is accessible both by phone and the web. To join this community, all you have to do is send an MMS message to 'free@itsmy.com'. In return you should receive at least one free download.

The community claims that "We have more stuff than your phone can handle." And they are probably right.

The top upload appears to be self-portraits for dating purposes. That's followed by guys (and maybe a few gals) uploading pictures of their flash cars.

In terms of free stuff, it's not a question of what has it got, it's a question of what do you want? Ringtones & games? No problem.

In addition to that, there are wallpapers; videos; mobile TV clips; themes; happy face generators; and - most interestingly - a personal avatar generator.

To get further content, you have to sign up. Which in the case of those subscribing to 3's service in the UK is a piece of cake because as soon as you select the option to go onto the web you will see an itsmy.com icon.

Signing up is pretty straightforward. As an added bonus, the signing up process gives you a free web page which you can view from a phone.

You can send the address to your friends so they can view it/laugh at it. Especially if you've uploaded a naughty picture of yourself which loads of people do.

In terms of generating MMS traffic, this has got to be very good news for the mobile operators.

While it's not mobile compatible, Jiglu appears to have 'soft-launched' itself as a new community. So softly that hardly anybody has noticed.

One of its founders, Nigel Canning, rather modestly claims, "We saw a gap in the market for something that combines the best of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, all wrapped up in a fantastic automatic tagging tool."

There's also a rather barbed reference to the fact that you can't view anybody's email address unless you're signed in. That should make it slightly more difficult for the spammers.

The INQ's tried Jiglu out and it is - as its makers claim- pretty easy to set up links to RSS feeds, for example, without requiring a degree in web design. µ

L'INQ
Itsmy.com
Jiglu.com