Three Reasons I Already Don’t Like Jumo

Lots of buzz about Jumo recently–the new social network whose mission is (ostensibly, at least) “We connect individuals and organizations working to change the world.” Why am I so bitter about Jumo already, you ask? Three reasons:

1) You must have a Facebook account to use it. Seriously? What if all you want to do is change the world and you hate Facebook? Then apparently you’re out of luck because signing up for Jumo REQUIRES a Facebook account.

2) You must allow Jumo to autopublish to your Facebook profile to use it. I signed up for Jumo just to see what it was about because, as the online community & social media manager for a nonprofit, I need to know this stuff. Why did Jumo need to autopost a message to my Facebook profile that I’d joined? I did go into my privacy settings on Facebook and was able to turn off autopost, but you cannot disconnect your Facebook profile from your Jumo account and still have it work (try it).

3) Jumo ties individual profiles to Company profiles. You’d think Chris Huges may have learned from Facebook the issues involved with connecting individual user accounts to company Pages/profiles. It took Facebook a while but they finally changed that feature earlier this year. It appears that Jumo company profiles can have just one page admin–granted, you need a company email address to be able to become admin for the page. Also, you can create a company profile without becoming an admin. At any rate, it’s confusing and presents the same problem tying individual Facebook accounts to Facebook company profiles does: if that person leaves the organization, you’re screwed.

Jumo is still too new to know how useful it will be–hell, you can’t even use it now because it’s so crashy. But I have to say, if it’s really to be about social good and all that, they need to cut the Facebook tie. Facebook is already making enough money over at Facebook–do they really need to lord over this network too?

BTW, here are instructions for adding your nonprofit to Jumo. It must be a registered 501(c)(3) organization.