Being a long time Entrecard user, I decided to give Bumpzee a try. Bumpzee! is another social networking site that works a little differently than Entrecard. All Entrecarders are welcome to come give it a try with me and post their impressions here. I created a community called “Entrecard” at Bumpzee anyone can join as long as they have an Entrecard displayed. Lets compare the 2 social networks.
Overview: Entrecard is a banner exchange, traffic exchange, and community forum all rolled into one. It uses credits to buy and sell ads, as well as real items in a shop. Users can participate actively by dropping cards, or passively by just receiving drops. It drives lots of traffic to active users.
Bumpzee! is a social network that allows you to join communities of interest. Each community has a discussion forum and allows you to submit articles the rest of the community can read. Articles you like can receive a “bump” which acts as a positive vote.
Widgets: Entrecard features a 125×125 widget with an additional area that features the “E”. Bumpzee’s widget is much larger in area, and shows the photos of recent visitors to the site. Size is customizable, if you can understand their instructions to edit a single line of code. If too complicated, they have several standard widgets as well. Both widgets can be found in my right sidebar.
Traffic: Entrecard provides me with 200-300 visitors a day. Because my site is an Entrecard niche site, that traffic is targeted. Others find most of the droppers stay for a few seconds only to drop their card. Still, you will find your comments rise in number once people see an article of interest.
Bumpzee provides targeted traffic from the communities you submit your article to. While you may only receive 8 visitors a day, most came specifically for your article. Joining larger communities exposes your article to more people.
Forums: Entrecard has a very helpful community. The forums are a bit clunky, but improve each update. All topics are lumped into a larger category like “community”, “marketing”, “support”, and so on. Entrecard forums are moderated very well to keep out the worst spam.
Bumpzee has a separate forum for each community. Some forums are dead, others are active. So before joining a community, read their discussions to see if it’s right for you. I see the occasional scam or pyramid scheme being promoted in some discussion boards. Seems the larger communities exist just so lots of eyes see each others post. If that’s what your goal is, go for it. If you have a small niche, and want to network with others of your niche, find an existing community for that niche, or start your own like I did. It was pretty simple to create, and running it takes almost no time.
Quality: Both Entrecard and Bumpzee have spammers in their system. I tried running my own forum once and spent all my time closing the accounts of bots. Both social networks have enough quality blogs that I can’t fault either network on this point.
Go ahead and give both a try!
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I have enough problems keeping up with Entrecard. Personaly i am tired of all these networking sites.
Entrecard is all I need for now
Nice review though
I’ve been in Bumpzee since last year September, I have a group there Filipino Bloggers. The widget is slow to load, if it loads at all. The worst thing you will get is an error box on the sidebar. It’s a yuck x3.
I loved Bumpzee, but the widget was slowing my blog down. I put it last on the sidebar, but it would still hang up. I finally took it off.
So far no issues for me. I notice sometimes I don’t see any “recent visitors”. I’m using the WordPress widget version. They also have java script versions. They says they are updating their code, so I will have to keep an eye on load times.
I had the same experience as CyberCelt. However, you did such a good job of articulating Bumpzees features I might rethink my decision. For instance, targeting one article or post and joining larger communities.
Hope you’re having a happy week-end~
Ann
This is a good idea – I signed up with Bumpzee several months ago but never really did anything with it. I’ve joined your entrecard community, updated my profile info, and submitted my blog for review.
Karlonia: Great to hear. Actually, there is another Bumpzee feature you can take advantage of that I didn’t mention. In theory you could join every community in Bumpzee. Then control which communites receive your latest post by using tags. It’s very simple to do, but I didn’t want to make my article overly complicated. Overall, I don’t think it’s that different than blogcatalog.
I have to agree with Lee on this one…I can’t keep up with my entrecard…and there’s the other “social networking places” that I “have” to be on in order to help keep track of my husband’s soldiers (can’t have them disparaging the unit or the Army, you know…)…I can barely keep track of all that stuff. But Bumpzee sounds okay…
Good comparison, Turnip. Although I have heard of this Bumpzee before, they seem be not be attracting visitors. Very seldom that I read posts about them. Actually, this is the first and most comprehensive one.
Definitely, EC is for me. Call it bounce rate but more of them are converting themselves into regular readers.
What I like about EC is you really have to work hard to gain more. Unlike others, you join a group without visiting the site. It’s like popularity contest only.
Thanks.
After joining a couple of days ago, I have received a few hits from Bumpzee. Hopefully, that will increase when my posts are indexed in the Entrecard community.
I definitely think it’s worth a try…..and the indexing of posts makes it quite different than BlogCatalog.
Good review, Turnip!
nicole
I’ve received over 14 hits in the 2 days running it. That’s just by counting the pictures in the widget. It helps to join a community there that fits your niche.
I never heard of bumpzee until i saw your post.
It’s an interesting review thanks for that.
As far as i am concerned i’ve been using entrecard for a few days now, surely i had a jump in traffic, but a lot of visitor just drop and go and that is pretty annoying when i concentrate on quality content.
I’ll wait another week or so to decide if its really worth it to use entrecard. It’s time consuming as well to get the ec and i though i could utilize that time into something more productive. The other problem is keeping up with all those widgets on a blog, having so many social networks means that you’ll spend more time into checking all these accounts.
Cheers
I shall pop over and take a look although Entrecard takes a lot of my time up. I have just joined Scoutle which works as an automatic social networking site so is easy to manage. Still in beta and early days but shows promise. I have just stumbled you too!
Mark: If you go around dropping the names of new social networks, you know I’m obligated to join them.
Next article will be on scoutle for sure.
Look forward to your next article!
I used to use Bumpzee but like several folk here, I found that the widget took a ridiculously long time to load. The other problem is that the administration was largely absentee for several months so they never worked on either improving the widget or even fully supporting a lot of blog platforms (Blogger for instance.)
I eventually removed the widget. However the admin have come back recently and have promised to upgrade the widget and the site:
http://www.bumpzee.com/blog/2008/06/17/diagnosis-poor/
You can open bumpzee in an i-frame and load your site normally. There are even plugins to do that. I noticed the site seemed pretty dead, and it took forever to get accepted into some communities. It had great potential, just seemed to be forgotten.