Rule of Product Management #675: If you’re going to post your mission on your homepage, make sure people can get behind it.  Vyoom, a new “real-time” social network presents their philosophy front and center on their homepage:

We at Vyoom believe members should be rewarded for connecting and sharing with friends, family and co-workers in a real-time environment.

Excuse me, what?  Why exactly should I be rewarded for chatting with my friends and family?  Shouldn’t the mere activity and social interaction of sharing helpful, entertaining, or personal information with my acquaintances be reward enough?  It sure is on Facebook, Twitter, email, or even in person.  Why do I need to be rewarded for this?  If I’m using your site because I want to be rewarded, I’m likely to overuse the site, flooding my friends and family with information they don’t want, and ultimately having them all block me and/or add me to their spam filters.

Further down on their homepage, they claim they have a “real-time” social network that lets me see what my friends are doing and customize what updates I want to see.  Their meta description (shown to search engines, but not on the site) describes them as a

Social network with advanced social capabilities and true real-time data streaming in both a public and a private network all in one platform

This featureset actually sounds like it might be interesting and differentiating, so why lead with the messaging about rewarding me for communicating with friends?  If you have a great new tool that will make my communications easier, lead with that.  You don’t need to bribe me.  If the product is that cool, I’ll use it and I’ll do your marketing for you by telling my friends.  This is a classic case of a split personality site – they seem to have a cool product, but their lead pitch doesn’t even mention its strengths.

And while we’re at it, Rule of Product Management #425: Avoid underlining words that are not hyperlinks.  Their homepage is riddled with underlined words that unfortunately I just can’t click on.

And you might be asking if I actually used the site…well, no.  I tried – I registered, but never got my confirmation email, and you can’t use the site at all without it.  I tried signing up with a different email address, and the registration form broke.   Sorry guys, I’m done.