Edmunds has been involved in social media for some time via the forums and other content on their main site. Recently, they launched CarSpace.com, which is a social site for auto enthusiasts. The information they ask of you when you register is going to be a gold mine - gender, age, cars you own, cars you are interested in, etc.
This graph records the decline of links to Edmunds.com from the blogosphere.
However, such a trend is hard to interpret. Alexa, for example, shows that Edmunds.com maintains an extremely high position: currently ranked 626. The Edmunds domain also hosts their Inside Line blog space.
As a non-auto-head, I don't think I'm the right person to evaluate what CarSpace offers. Visually, though, I felt it was somewhat clunky. So far the MySpace cloning is working...
Scott Karp, at Publishing 2.0, has an interesting perspective on CarSpace:
Memetrackers are a great example of this problem. Instead of building the same app over and over for no one in particular, what they should be doing is something like CarSpace. The lesson of MySpace is not to go off and create a direct competitor to MySpace, but to use that approach to define a value proposition for a distinct group of people — in this case, people who dig cars.
I think this is a great point. The first movers in many social media spaces prove that the mechanism works. Their value generally increases as the audiences get more specialised. Replicating the same method, for the same audience ignores the fact that there is less competition in diversity.
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