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Life in the vLane: An Aid to Automotive ResearchSeptember 17th, 2008 at 5:31 amSource:Mashable! The Wall Street Journal rolled out their long awaited new look over the weekend, and I actually had a chance to take a look at it yesterday due to all the AIG/Lehman brothers mess as I tried to get a handle on what was going on. What’s interesting, aside from the design itself is that they’ve implemented community and social networking features that are almost completely unique to the web we all know and love; the WSJ socnet is (like much of the featured content) behind a paywall. PaidContent called the new look “dark and brooding,” but I think it’s just the newspaper being overly emo and dramatic amidst some particularly depressing economic news-cycles. Fellow Mashable writer Leslie Poston wrote about this earlier yesterday over at Tech.Blorge that the Journal may have completely missed the boat putting their social network behind a paywall. I’m not sure I’m in complete agreement:
The Wall Street Journal decides to launch its own social network. Unfortunately, this is one of many attempts at entering the social media for enterprise space that screams “You’re doing it wrong”. How is the Wall Street Journal missing the boat with their attempt at community building? For starters, they have made their community an exclusive, behind-close-doors paid subscription service. By trying to be another FaceBook or LinkedIn for paid subscribers and excluding casual visitors and readers, the Wall Street Journal effectively eliminates the most important aspect of social media for enterprise - community building. While I’ve never been a fan of the pay-wall in general, there have been a number of situations where I think it’s a very viable business model. PEHub, for one, offers some of very advanced information that’s available by paid subscription only. The information contained therein is generally only useful for a very short and finite period of time, and the folks it ends up being useful to usually have the money to pay for it. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal came from those same roots. In recent years, they’ve gone a lot more mainstream with their editorial policies, not to mention their readership. Chances are, though, if you use the Wall Street Journal as your filter on the news, you belong to a somewhat elite community. Getting access to the minds and the contacts within that elite community are almost as much of a selling point to pony up the fee to get behind the paywall as the content itself. In other words, mark it on your calendar folks, because we may be witnessing the first successful attempt to sell access to a social network. —Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:YellowPages Redesigned to Better Accommodate Local SearchFacebook Profile Redesign: Sandbox Now Open to DevelopersFacebook Sets Second Redesign Launch Attempt for TonightStop The Press - Mashable Redesign Leaked!BoingBoing Gets a Gadget Blog, Comments and RedesignFacebook Puts Off Early April RedesignYahoo Rearranges Homepage, Moves Logo To Center
vLane is a new automotive research site that can help car buyers by providing a great deal of information from other car buyers and owners. They try to accomplish this by accumulating as much opinion and information that they can about vehicles from people with real world experience. Users can gather a ton of useful feedback because it isn’t the usual marketing hype or sales propaganda. Considering the Source The most important element to vLane is its reliance on its members for their thoughts and opinions on vehicles. After all, you will be relying on those opinions a great deal when you’re researching a vehicle to purchase. Think of it like the Ebay ratings for buyers or sellers, only applied to cars. You can add other members whose opinions you trust as a contact just as you can on social networks. This way, you can build a knowledgeable and helpful circle of friends that can all help one another when it comes to researching vehicles. Don’t become a Deer caught in the headlights The vFinder feature is a helpful tool for finding the exact vehicle that you want and need. There are plenty of sliders to help you select all of the options that you want in the vehicle. OK, none of this is ground-breaking but the thing that makes it different is the ability to ask questions about anything you want. The vLane community will usually respond with answers to your question in much the same way that Yahoo Answers does. Research and Analysis The Research area provides even further ammunition as you search for the best deal for your vehicle. It has reviews from owners of that particular vehicle as well as Polls which track the questions that other car buyers have had for that model. It’s a great way to learn things you never would’ve thought to ask about or look into. The comparison feature is another very useful tool as you can narrow down your search and pit them head to head, feature for feature. Everything Old is New Again Don’t be misled, vLane isn’t just about new cars. The service is also geared (no pun intended) towards helping car buyers find the best deals for previous used vehicles. One of the best places to look is their Classifieds section which is like Craigslist for cars. Simply enter your zip-code and the make and model and other criteria and you’ll get a list of all the vehicles that match your description in your area. Conclusion vLane’s concept of aggregating all of your research information for buying a vehicle in one place is strong and long over-due. It’s also a great feature to be able to communicate with other people who are also performing research as well as people who know something about the vehicle you’re interested in. The only thing that feels missing is the actual process of purchasing your vehicle online. It doesn’t appear that you can even purchase a vehicle through vLane at this point in time. There is a link to PriceQuotes which is another service that specializes in online car purchases thru large chains such as AutoNation, AutoWeb, CarDirect and others. Still, if all you want to do is conduct serious research for your next vehicle then vLane is your ticket to ride.
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