Health Social Networks

WellSphere fans might not want to continue reading this review, but the way I see it the chances of an unpaid fan showing up are pretty slim.

WellSphere is the classic 1998 story only it's happening a century later. An Israeli entrepreneur living in America convincing an Israeli VC who is about to give birth and knows very little about internet (she's no longer a VC…) that he is going to take over the wellness world with his ground breaking – world changing – patent pending – air blowing – bla bla idea. She buys it and gives a first time entrepreneur with no experience at anything an unprecedented $4.5M seed. WOOOOW. The only one to top that was the VP of Facebook and top Yahoo executive Doug Hirsch of DailyStrength. The funder of Promotions.com (Steven Krein) and His CMO (Unity Stoakes) managed to raise only half of that for OrganizedWisdom. WOOOOW.

To make sure they don't break the chain WellSphere executives play the game when they start off as an enterprise solution, move to being an internet wellness solution then offer a white label solution to institutions (and manage only a beta with their own school) later to become an all around health network and now it look like they want to be a search engine, all this time not missing a single chance to change their UI and theme, one beautiful UI after the other getting trashed and a graphic designer getting rich. A big party with all the major bloggers and a CEO getting drunk on a PR video (I already said Wellness, right??), a lot of angry ex-employees spitting their guts out. And again. And doing major PR screaming: Hey Hey LOOK AT US - We're Just like Facebook. Ammmm – you're not.

What can you get on WellSphere?

The homepage looks great. A nice clean white page with a trendy large search box in the middle. The bottom looks a bit too spammy to me but… wait wait a minute… a white page, big search box and an apple… did they hire the previous OrganizedWisdom designer?

To the test:

Search for bipolar. Landed on a very crowded page full of results in many categories. Articles, wellpedia, video, members, pictures, news, resources, ask an expert. Lots & lots of links to many different areas. Unorganized & threatening as hell. If I'm bipolar this is when I hit my homepage bookmark. But I'm not so I did follow some of those links and the content was actually very good. No community whatsoever but Interesting articles & a lot of info great as a source of information. Too bad the SEO expert took over because the page is just an unbearable user experience.

I couldn't take it anymore and decided to skip the next text.

Final Words

The Good:

1. Raised a lot of money.

2. Most chances they still have some left.

3. Great graphic designer.

The Bad:

1. No real value or meaning.

2. SEO expert took over the inside pages.

3. Check out the awfully annoying JavaScript page for communities.