Vertagio, social networking startup

Vertagio, already has a buzz building since it’s early public beta release this month. They opened the doors back on April 4th, and have not looked back. The network itself is built on the MySpace idea of letting users customize their pages. I took a look around, and I am seeing what Kristen was seeing early today.

Seeing that she already wrote a decent article, I inquired further directly with her. She had nothing negative to say in our private chat. I then inquired with John Brancela, a member of the Vertagio Management Team, of some other questions I had.

One of the main things I noticed about Vertagio are there are no annoying “date me please” ads all over the site. I asked him if one of the ways they were planning to make money was by another more exciting route. Unfortunately, the answer is that they will be adding in advertising shortly, but in spots that don’t take away from the user experience.

This always remains to be seen, and I hope they can pull that off. Currently they will also be using targeted ads on the area known as “The Desktop”. Since I wasn’t a registered user, I couldn’t see that area. One thing that was kind of nice to see was the implementation of the Google Map API. For every user, you can see where a particular city is. For example, the user (screenshot below) (Robbie) lives in Surrey, British Columbia. The nice thing about the Map API begin there, is that you can find out quickly where exactly “Surrey, BC” is located.

I did however run into a wall as far as “what” the innovative new features they are bringing to social networking. That for me was the most compelling item I read in the Yahoo press release.

to expand Vertagio.com by offering new features and implementing never before seen technological advances that will be an industry first on the social networking scene.

He did however state that all the items are in current development or the final stages pending completion. This I believe will be critical to attracting new users to the site. They also will be adding “contests”, which many of us have seen on the social networking scene to attract new users.

Vertagio is a Vancouver, BC venture of Eonix Corporation. The company is self-funded and looking for possible VC investment.

This article was written by Rex Dixon who runs a technology blog at rexduffdixon.com