Squidoo Clubs, How Long Are they Going To Last?

I've joined Squidoo back in February 2007 and even nowadays, I'm still amazed seeing how we're repeated the same things over and over again, just using different words.

On the 11th April, HQ made an annoucement for all lensmasters to joing their "groups". Ah... Squidoo's groups. I remember those groups very well ! 

There have been a bunch of groups on Squidoo over the years, none of them survived more than the time it was allowed. Whatever their name, whatever the purpose, no group lasted for long. I don't speak about groups like RocketSquids here - I'll talk about them later. No I mean : groups, like those that do exist now : the veggie group, the pop culture group, and so on...

First they allowed some lensmasters to use Squidoo pages to create these groups. These Squidoo groups were managed directly from the group's main lens and to say the truth, I only joined one of them more or less at the time HQ put an end to these groups.

So group leaders were left with nothing to manage, Squidoo was left with a bunch of useless lenses, that were nothing but links and made the site look like junk.

I remember the next types of groups very well. These were named sister sites, groups, clubs, cobrand or whatever, they still were some kind of groups or at least clubs. Who remembers SquidWho, SquidFlix, SquidBoo Club, SquidPaw club, the Horse Club, the Big Red Bow, the Cupcake Club and so on?

Many of these groups used to have a bespoke designed template on which you could build your lenses. The day they removed those groups/clubs/cobrands/whatever, the template became the basic blue Squidoo template that was introduced a couple of years (not sure about the exact year) after Squidoo's birth and that made SquidBoo, cupcake, SquidWho and other lenses look like junk. I had to manually review all my lenses and set a new template for each of them.

As said: how long did these groups last? Not very long. Each were given a temporary life. What a mess, what a waste of time ! Even the Cupcake Club disappeared although its leader is one of the community organizers!

As for the other groups, well, I do remember the RocketMoms - probably mothers of RocketSquids??? - the Giant Club where we used to get challenges for making our Giant status. There were more groups but I've never joined any of them and don't remember their name.

Some friends and I joined the Giant Club three month ahead of making Giant and worked hard. We were encouraged doing things the right way, it was lots of fun. But Ning replaced its free platform with a paying one and these groups disappeared too. 

There's only one group of this type and on Ning left: the Fresh Wonders of which I'm a proud member. The Fresh Wonders is run by Michelle Willow who never left her members down the road. And we all make a yearly donation for the group to survive.

So, when I head to read HQ's post saying that they wanted us to join the groups, I asked myself: "Do you really want to join a group and work hard while knowing that won't it last long ?" 

Then I thought about the last things that happened, especially the filter that entered into action right before Easter, when all of us were so busy promoting our Squidoo Easter lenses, having so many other things to do than fixing those flagged pages. I also wondered if working hard for one or more groups was a good idea: with the traffic drop the site is experiencing.

Then the answer was quite quick and short : NO.

Still, I told Bonnie that none of the former groups lasted for long. But new Squids have no idea what we, old timers have known and experienced. They'll learn with time. And probably like many, be highly disappointed. 

Ok I'm free to leave, to move my work elsewhere, but in the end, I worked too hard to see all my work vanish forever.

Posted by Squidoo Angel Prosperity66