Rick Marini is a man of many interests. He loves the Boston Red Sox, Steven Colbert, and he's a huge music fan. Some might call him the ultimate SuperFan, the fitting name of his recently launched new social media site.
SuperFan is based in San Francisco, but its mission is on a global scale. Through his site, Marini hopes to connect people all over the world with similar interests, be they in music, or politics or Trek bikes.
You begin as you would any other social media site by creating a profile. It asks you to list your favorites -- band, actor, movie, sports team -- and from here you're tossed into a virtual world of endless pop culture icons, known here as "faves," of which you can become a fan, or even an anti-fan.
Just about everyone and everything is here, from historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, to gadgets like the iPod Touch, to beloved fictional characters like Marty McFly and Big Bird.
You bide your time -- at least in the beginning -- scouring through everything you can think of and selecting your favorites. Then you're free to do more, like keep a blog or take a quiz.
So, what's the point?
Marini says it's to create a giant database of everything in the world that people love.
"Myspace does a good job with music and pop culture, but it kind of stops there," he says. "Facebook does a good job connecting people and you can list your interests, but it's on the second tab and nobody ever really looks at that.
"I see us at the intersection of the efficient communication platform that Facebook offers, the fun and customization of Myspace and the self-expression of Twitter. I see us in the middle of all three, but not necessarily a head-to-head competitor of any."
A user might find certain similarities to Facebook's "pages" feature, in that you have the ability to become a fan of something. The difference, however, is that Facebook pages are created by the fans themselves and SuperFan's pages are created by its staff, insuring that there is only one official Lil Wayne profile and not 265 half-assed ones.
But that's not to say that the site isn't user-controlled, and this is where the term "superfan" actually comes into play. Fans compete to become the SuperFan of, say, Zooey Deschanel because at this heightened level of fandom, users are allotted more control over Zooey's page, i.e. profile design and the ability to upload photos and video.
The SuperFan staff launched with about 80 percent of the faves that matter to the masses -- the Madonnas, the U2s, the Brad Pitts of the world -- but there will always be an expanding pool of smaller, independent or under-the-radar people, artists, bands or fun new toys that emerge over time.
This, Marini says, is where he's relying on his users to make suggestions, which they can do via the site. If the suggestion is legitimately interesting to the community, it gets set up by the customer care team as a fave. If it's your dog, it gets denied. The end result, then, really is a huge virtual library of life's pleasures.
"I'm a media guy," says Marini. "I love music, I love movies, I'm a huge sports fan, and these are kinds of things I want people to know about me. People love to talk about what they love and express themselves and we're trying to give people a tool to do that across every genre. There is no other site out there that is doing something this broad."
OnMilwaukee.com staff writer Julie Lawrence grew up in Wauwatosa and has lived her whole life in the Milwaukee area.
As any “word nerd” can attest, you never know when inspiration will strike, so from a very early age Julie has rarely been seen sans pen and little notebook. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee it seemed only natural that she major in journalism. When OnMilwaukee.com offered her an avenue to combine her writing and the city she knows and loves in late 2004, she knew it was meant to be. Around the office, she answers to a plethora of nicknames, including “Lar,” (short for “Larry,” which is short for “Lawrence”) as well as the mysteriously-sourced “Bill Murray.”
