Of all the dumb social media ideas, The Hub, from Wal-Mart, must have been one of the worst. The Wal-Mart exec who thought this one up was recently promoted to greeter after years of being in charge of picking up dog doo from the parking lot at a store in Hot Springs, AR. Okay, I jest, but you get the point. This attempt to clone MySpace was merely an online back to school sales flyer with a social network functionality that didn’t function too well. To put this another way, The Hub was about as uncool as MySpace is today.

Examples of the Uncoolness

Users are identified by Wal-Mart as “Hubsters”
Usually the users of a social network self-identify. On Twitter, I can be a tweep, a twitterer, a tweetie or whatever someone wants to call me. My preference? I call followers tweeps.

Parental Notification
Parents were emailed for either registration approval or upon video submissions to the site. I’ve read different accounts about this, but parental notification of any sort probably won’t get the kids at school, saying, “We’ve got to sign up for this cool new site, they email our parents to tell them what we’re doing.”

Sheer Stupidity
The Hub had four stereotypical kids featured throughout the site used as props to sell Wal-Mart clothes. There’s even a quote on the site which says, ““I’ll school my way by looking hot in my WalMart clothes…to catch a cute boy’s eye”. Has that quote come anywhere close to exiting the mouth of a tween or teen in America? Maybe in Moldova, but America? No way.

Lesson Learned

When it comes to being social and networks, Wal-Mart has decided to stick with personal greeters at the front doors of their network of big box discount stores. No more attempts at faux social networks for them. At least we hope not. Bandwidth is too precious for that.