Hawkee Becomes MySpace For Geeks


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Traditionally, Hawkee has been a place for the developer community to share code, which is somewhat of a social network. As of today, however, the site is officially a bona fide social network.

Just in time for the holidays, Hawkee’s new focus is social networking for electronics shopping. Users can compare prices, opinions, and reviews on various electronics. Products are tagged and users can filter through a tag cloud to find what they want. They can also filter the tags to find the reviews written by people within their social network.

Scott Aikin, the founder of Hawkee, said he tried to make sure that he had all of the “basic social networking” features. So you can create a profile with a picture, leave comments for your friends, send private messages, etc. But you can also read your friend’s recommendations, snippets, and scripts, almost like their own personal blog. You can also search the electronics that they have tagged in their wishlists when it comes to gift giving time.

Hawkee also has a new Deals page where Aikin and his staff post coupons that they negotiate themselves with vendors such as Wal-Mart and Overstock.

Unfortunately, Hawkee only has user reviews on the products listed right now. Aikin says he is working to try to share content with other sites that have product reviews such as Amazon or perhaps CrunchGear.

“I wanted to get this out before the holidays are over so it’s not populated as well as I’d like just yet,” Aikin said.

Hawkee is hardly sexy or flashy but MySpace has never been either of those things on its own. Users and content are what make a social network popular and useful so I think that Hawkee has the potential to be as hot as the gadget-loving community wants it to be.

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