Wannabe website attracts cult following

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Wannabe website attracts cult following

 

Last updated at 12:19pm on 25th October 2006

Some of the community members on the website

 

 

 

When Stephen Lambert, the creator of TV series Shipwrecked created a website to urge wannabee stars to sign up, he had no idea of the response he would get.

Since its launch last month, the internet site Islandoo.com has spawned its own young and hip community with 18,000 profiles and 1.5million comments from users.

• See an example of the attention-seeking videos here

• And another one: Don't try this at home

It is one of the first TV programme sites which allows photo and video uploading as well as messaging.

Explaining its popularity, Mr Lambert told the Financial Times: "With a chat room, there is mainly one public conversation with everybody. Here people get to know each other between themselves."

Sam Sethi of TechCrunchUK, the technology blogging site added: "The site mixes the social network aspect of MySpace, instant messaging of MSN and YouTube videos in a single applications."

Online social networks are big business with advertisers keen to cash in on their popularity among a young demographic. RDF Media, the television production group which launched the website is currently talking to advertising agencies.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought MySpace.com last year for £312million and Google recently paid $1.65billion for YouTube.com

Mr Lambert wants to keep the website to audition contenders for other programmes and as a source of user-generated content.