'Edgee', a New Social Network, Is, Unsurprisingly, Not

​There are social networks that try to appeal to millennials, and then there are social networks that call themselves "Edgee."

Edgee—as in, "We're so edgy that our slick promo video contains numerous references to 1984 and Occupy Wall Street"—is a new social network no doubt angling for a slice of that demographic, but how does it stack up to other ostensibly radical newcomer sites like Ello?

Let's start with how it works: On Edgee, you create "edgees"—seriously—which are collections of text, articles, images, GIFs, and videos that users can arrange as they see fit, then sort into one of a dozen categories. The site makes a big deal about being able to share "ALL MEDIA," which is actually kind of a nice change from the likes of Facebook, where you can't even make your cover photo a GIF yet (although Ello allows you to do the same). With edgees, you can tell a story or curate a collection of pretty pictures.

The site's parent company is a Berlin-based startup called CulturalMe GmbH. The site is making its way into the US market with the help of Silicon Valley-based German business incubator program, German Accelerator, and private investments. It launched in beta today.

On the whole, Edgee doesn't feel as freewheeling as Ello or Big Boring System, another stripped-down newcomer. You have one way to share posts on Edgee, and it's a paint-by-numbers game. It's also not clear how different edgees are from the curated web stories you can create on, say, Storify.

But what about Edgee's implicit claims of being some kind of fuck-the-man alternative to social networking? Ello famously positioned itself contra to capitalist advances on internet activity, with a radically anti-commercial stance that broached upon the topic of surveillance, a blacked-out smiley face logo, and a commitment to not selling your information. How do the two stack up on that front?

First, unlike Ello, Edgee actually works in its beta testing stage. That's kind of rad, I guess, but I'm not sure that it's radical. Also unlike Ello, Edgee, for all of its Orwellian posturing, doesn't really give a hoot about keeping your data from advertisers. Ello made its bones in the press by distancing itself from how corporate social networks like Facebook sell your data to advertisers, so you'd think that Edgee would take a strong stance against this, as well. Not so.

Edgee's privacy policy states that they will use your data to "show you ads you might be interested in," and they collect about as much data as any other site: Your device information, any personal information you share with the site, and they will use persistent cookies that won't be deleted until you clear your browser of them to track your activity across the web.

On the PR front, Edgee was pitched to me in an email as an "anti-Buzzfeed." That's a weird comparison for a couple reasons, not least because Buzzfeed isn't a social network, but also because Edgee no doubt encourages users to cram words, images, and numerous linked web pages into their eyeballs all at once. Buzzfeed's reporting comes off like prime Cronkite in comparison.

As an explicit This. competitor, on Edgee you'd expect a level of discourse slightly above the rest of the 'net. For whatever reason, the majority of the posts I came across contain TED Talks—the intellectual equivalent of a massage or gentle jack-off from a white dude in a blazer and faded jeans. Although, I did come across some pretty nice edgees. This one about fractals, the crazy mathematical patterns found in nature, is pretty good.

At the end of the day, though, I was pretty much left thinking:

So, is Edgee edgy? Not really. It's just trying really, really hard. But who knows, it seems to work fairly well and may just be on to something with its approach to posting images and text. Maybe it'll stick around? Then again, maybe not. Either way, it's sure to have a minimal impact on my life.