Political Social Networks: Essembly

There are a few political social networks out there in this tech savvy election year. We've already reviewed a few of them for this series, and today we turn our sights to Essembly. Essembly began as a place for people to find like-minded people on the political spectrum, as well as a place to get political news and information from all sides of a debate.

The moment you sign up you are presented with a series of “Resolves” to vote on. This gives you a chance to fine tune your ideological place in the Essembly network. The more Resolves you answer, the better chance you have of accurate matches. You can also post Resolves for others to answer.

The first hint that Essembly wasn't as focused as other political networking sites were the Resolves. The first three were political in nature, question about how you saw certain hot button topics. Then the Resolves posted by other Essemblers started to pop up, and things started to unravel.

I fail to see what a question about whether or not you like the Beatles, for example, has to do with politics. And once the Resolve questions started to falter, the atmosphere of the site seemed to change. It began to feel frivolous, and undirected. If I want to find other people who like the Beatles, I will go to MySpace or FaceBook, not a political social networking site. I came to Essembly to get a more directed approach to politics.

I was ready to throw in the towel when I saw how little useful information was being presented to me, but in the interest of a complete review I decided to soldier on. In addition to the Resolves, you also have a place to set up a Profile for yourself, a place to find People who share your views, and a place to find or set up Groups. The Profile page is pretty standard for Web 2.0 networking sites: picture, about me section, lists of your people, groups and resolves, discussion list and messages.

I didn't see any standout way to announce to the member my political views, or to see theirs. I get the impression that when the site first started, the Resolves were designed to sort users into ideological groups. However, the Resolves are now flawed. Going back to the example of the Beatles question - music often has nothing to do with ideology. I enjoy the Beatles. I am fairly Libertarian in my leanings. My friend enjoys the Beatles, and she is a Democrat and a hippy throw back. My neighbor enjoys the Beatles, and he is über conservative and voted for Bush - both times. You can see how this Resolve is not helpful.

The site itself is quite bland. I realize that a political site is going with the red, white and blue theme as a given, but Essembly didn't even try to make it look fresh. It comes across as stodgy and boring, whether they intended that or not.

Moving along to the Groups, I wanted to see what answering the Resolves (both ideological and political, as expected, and a few of the strange user submitted ones) had done for my ideological grouping. My choices when clicking “Groups: Local” had two political groups for local candidates, and three or four groups with odd names like “No Meanies” and “Green Is My Favorite Color” (group names paraphrased to keep them private). Both local candidates were most decidedly not an ideological match for me.

Moving on, I decided to try the more idealized “Groups: Ideologically Close” and see what my answers had gained me. Again, I was presented a seemingly random selection of groups that nothing to with me, and in most cases nothing to do with politics or political issues. To make sure I gave the site a fair enough shake, I went back to Resolves and answered more questions. Answering more Resolves did not change my irrelevant group results one iota. That was disappointing to say the least.

Browsing around the site and viewing the various sections and user profiles, I can see that Essembly started off as a site for user driven ideological political matches for news and social networking. I'd be willing to bet when the site first came out it was relevant, and I can see in the older groups that the Resolves used to work as intended. There are plenty of long standing groups and people with clearly stated ideologies. That doesn't help the newcomer, though.

With no way to skip the questions that are irrelevant to politics and social issues in the Resolves, and no way to police user uploaded questions or to vote them down, Essembly will only become less and less relevant over time. The whole experience was similar to herding cats - a frustrating pass time that has no point. If it is political social networking you want, I'd suggest skipping Essembly. Head for 20DC if you are in the younger set, try out VocalNation (to be reviewed next), join a candidate web site, or just use FaceBook - all of these options will get you much more relevant results than Essembly.

Edited at 3:28 Jan 18, 2008 to fix a dropped link.