Fun with Classmates.com - Part 2

"Unleashing Your Creativity While You're Moonlighting," a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, exhorts readers to "build a brand." Among the words of wisdom:

[G]etting your name out there is an important way to drum up business. But for part-timers with less wherewithal to put toward marketing, creating a Web site with work samples or a portfolio becomes even more important in getting business going. Mr. Belsky [Scott Belsky, CEO and founder of Behance, a New York-based company that develops products and online tools for creative industries] suggests setting up a blog, joining LinkedIn groups related to your interest, and using Twitter to get your work noticed by more people. Creating a profile with free-lance job boards like Odesk.com, Guru.com and Elance.com is another way to get your name out.

It's interesting that, at the same time I was checking out classmates.com, I was also looking at these free-lancing sites. What's the connection (besides a temporal one)? Though Odesk, etc., are clearly not social networking sites, both classmates.com and these sites use similar tactics. They all speak to people's (naive? reckless? misguided?) need to connect.

Specifically, these sites (classmates.com included) require:

• Disclosure of -- potentially sensitive -- information in order to register (with little knowledge/assurance of how that information is going to be used/abused).
• A -- potentially significant -- investment of time and money (free-lance sites have subscription fees; you have to scour the site for possible jobs; even if you don't score the work, you still have to draft a proposal for every job you bid on; even if you win and complete the work, there's no guarantee that you'll get paid).

As you trawl through these sites, you get the queasy feeling of being conned. That soft, sweet promise of a big payoff. "Meet old classmates." "Get lucrative work." And when the outcome is (so much) less than you imagined...

As one commenter had to say about Elance:

Elance has enabled some fairly dodgy people to hire desperate East Europeans/Africans/Pakistanis/Indians/Chinese/etc writers, coders, artists, programmers, designers etc for pay so low it really should be a human rights violation.

Funny, but the Journal reporter failed to mention that.