Xanga- Retaining Loyalty of Its Young Users despite Intense Competition

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Xanga began its journey as a book sharing and music review website. It soon became an online journal and diary sharing website. Finally, it morphed into a blogging platform with an estimated following of 27-40 million users.

Xanga has successfully attracted maximum number of young persons and teenagers into its fold. As Donna Nguyen says, “I like my xanga”. I’ve had it since like 5th grade and I’m in 10th grade.” It is indeed creditable for a website to successfully retain the loyalty of the youth and teenagers in a world where newer and more glamorous blogging platforms keep coming up.

The primary characteristic of Xanga which differentiates it from all other websites is the fact that each member gets a Xanga site which is also called xangas. Once you register, you get a xangas to your name and you can use it to establish your online presence. Unlike other platforms like wordpress and blogger, xanga offers 1 GB space for the registered user to upload as much data, photos and videos as they want. Of course, the premium option offers an unlimited space service as well.

All users of Xanga can subscribe to other websites created by other users. The most popular website is one which has received maximum subscriptions. Further, users can give eprops, which can best be described as a virtual pat on the back, to posts which they approve. They can give a maximum of two eprops per post.

As far as social networking is concerned, Xanga offers Blogrings and Metros to its users. Blogrings are groups of blogs that have been linked through common interests. On the other hand, Metros is geographical in nature and helps you link up with people who live close by. This is a very interesting feature which helps individuals living close by to form a virtual neighborhood as well.

Xanga may have changed into a blogging platform but it has not ceased to be a place where surfers could interact with each other and exchange information. Xanga offers all the basic tools required for easy and quick blogging. Spell check, rich text editor, multiple fonts- these are just some of the features that Xanga offers.

Xanga has purposefully worked towards creating a community with intense loyalty towards the parent website and to the members of the community. That is the reason why various social networking websites like Digg and Delicious face tough competition from Xanga.

Unlike Blogger, Xanga does not allow its site to be used for commercial purposes although there is a surfeit of ads on the website. This move, which may have backfired, has ensured that Xanga still remains a place where people can get together to do nothing more than plain old blogging.

Xanga offers the facility of not just creating a text blog but also a photo blog. This puts it in direct competition with websites like Facebook

Click here to find out more about the features of Xanga

Click here for a review of Xanga

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