remember those magnets?

Of course you do. Those ones that were everywhere for awhile ... no one I knew ever even knew where they came from. Anyway, from what I can tell (I think it was a Newsnet article), the Lymabean of the magnet days used to be mostly a buying-and-selling site, but now they've morphed into something a bit more exciting.

Just so we're all in the clear, I have a friend who works for these guys, and he showed me around a bit so I could tell you about it. The nice thing for you is that I'm not getting anything out of this, so I can say whatever I want, good or bad! It's a risky job PR people have ...

That said, this is a pretty neat thing. Lymabean is something like Facebook, but instead of having a focus on networking (Facebook is still accomplishing its purpose of keeping you connected to people even if you're only logging in weekly or less), Lymabean is more of a "use me" site. From what I understand, it's also exclusively for college students, while Facebook is open to anyone now. I mean, Lymabean won't kick you out when you graduate, but the site is so inherently college-campus-based, you wouldn't really have a lot of use for it once you graduated anyway. Really, Lymabean users would probably use Facebook, too.

In short, it's an electric shades-of-green site that interconnects people, businesses, clubs and community activity, in a given geographical area (specifically, a college campus, at least right now. I could see expansion to other community groups, but this is what it is now). It uses a Flash-based interface, so everything is drag-and-drop - it's actually amazingly user-friendly. I'm not sure if that will create problems for older machines (I don't think my Linux could handle it), but Flash is getting a lot friendlier the more people use it, so I'm sure there's a pretty high compatibility there. It has places for alerts, Craigslist-like listings (or to see deals from local businesses), chats, subscriptions, etc., but also has a lot of personal interconnectivity like Facebook. For instance, it still has the news feed function. But green! The one thing I haven't liked as well is that you can't resize the windows. I like resizing windows ... but at some point they'll probably add that. Oh, and I sort of wish all these boxes would just be in one box so you don't have to click in and out of everything all the time(that's why I would want to resize the windows instead of having them overlap), but for all its functionality, I suppose that's a small price to pay.

My personal favorite thing about this site (besides that it's green) is the media manager. It has a section for your music and video, slideshows, etc. You upload your own stuff and other people can stream it, and you can stream theirs. It's all legal because Lymabean pays the ASCAP fee (the same fee they pay in a basketball arena or somewhere they play the music publicly ... it's a broadcasting license). That gives you license to play whatever you want, like an online radio station. Raaaad. I don't know if it would replace my Imeem! but cool.

What it looks like:




In other words, be on the lookout for this. It'll come to BYU sometime in January-February, it sounds like, so this is a bit early, but it's cool enough to tell you about so you can start paying attention. If you care, you can check out more about them at www.lymabean.com or www.behindthebean.com - you can become an Insider at behindthebean and get a free t-shirt as a student pre-user, and see the pre-launch stuff. Perhaps most importantly, you can give your own input on the site. Anyway, it's very cool. Check it out.