Google Buzz 2010 – Hip Cats Buzz 2000

Google has just announced Google Buzz which lets you post and share status lines from your g-mail.  Buzz is a good word – Dan Zen sure did not invent buzz – it being around at least from the early 70s and more likely a 60s maybe even 50s term.  But in celebrating the hip word for what’s happening, Dan Zen did use Buzz in Hipcats the social media site from 2000 pictured above.

The Buzz section let you post on the following topics which is a little different than a plain status post:

• Media Reviews (Books, Video, Music)
• Cool Websites
• A Happening
• A Protest
• A Zen Koan
• A Radical Idea
• A First Time
• A Translation (themes to translate words in Hip Cats)

Never really did catch on – but the rest of the site had its moments 😉

Hip Cats Social Networking Site Makes Top Google Spot 7 Years Later…

Finally made the top Google page for Hip Cat and Hip Cats. I spent years fuming over being ousted by the likes of Cat Hip Displasia Injuries ;-). Try out the link and please click on Hip Cats!

Google Hip Cat Search Results

Hip Cats was and is a social networking site that was started in 2000. It allowed you to create a persona, make a friends list of people you wanted to hang out with, rate other hip cats, date them, see their favorite music, movies, and books – all connected to Amazon affiliate. You could message other hip cats and view them in different Hip Cat genres like beatnik psychedelia, goth, urban, surf and their words would get translated – good would become groovy, etc. There is a buzz section where users can post reviews, events and creative writing as well as custom moods to view Hip Cats through.

It was a very early dynamic html (DHTML) site that featured updates to certain parts of the page without loading the hole page – which is what AJAX is used for and all this Web 2.0. It was cross platform and still works today which is pretty amazing considering it is a thousand lines of JavaScript, and another five thousand lines of Perl.

The site is self modifying where hip cats that are rated poorly drop off the scene – their data is mailed to the creator.

In the first few months, thousands of Hip Cats were created, top ten Hip Cats messages were sent out to people, and friendships were made. I tried to get other companies or groups to take Hip Cat scenes. There is a SHIFT magazine scene but it went out of business. There is a Beatnik Museum scene but I do not think they added the link. I almost got Austin Powers to take it but it turned out that they thought I wanted to pay for advertising. So it was all very frustrating not to be able to get people to take a free scene and populate it with their fans. It had so much potential.