For Sale: Creaky Web 1.0 Social Network

Techvibes, the venerable online and offline Vancouver technology community, is up for sale. The starting bid is about CAN $70,000.

When I was new to the industry, I thought Techvibes was the bee’s knees. They had schmoozy parties in cool clubs, and sometimes there were girls in tight t-shirts. This was what the technology sector was all about, right?

As I grew more experienced, and met more people, the bloom wore off the rose. I was most unimpressed with their trade show, and their events seemed to be filled with salesmen and job seekers. There’s nothing wrong with either of those groups, but when you hate networking at the best of times, it’s not ideal territory. Like their trade show, the presentations at Techvibes were really just paid sales pitches.

Old School

Apparently the founders of Techvibes originated from Club Zone, whose bumper stickers are ubiquitous on telephone poles and utility boxes. There’s that sense about them, too, that they’re an event production company instead of community facilitators. This may be putting too fine a point on it, but I think they’ve failed to respond to the changing ethos of the technology community.

Regardless, I’m sure there are well-intentioned people behind Techvibes. It’s had its day in the sun, et cetera and so forth.

I don’t know much about these things, but CAN $70,000 sounds like a deal for a website this big and popular. Will Pate did once remark that their SEO was tremendously old school (witness, for example, the link farm of the ‘new year’s eve’ links on the bottom of this Techvibes forum page, and there’s even some very intentional outgoing links on their auction page), but they’ve got an email list of 42,000 members and a big ass site. According to the auction page, the site generates $5 to $10K in revenue.

 I’ll be curious to see where the auction ends up.