Moreover, it truly needs to have a strong focus on real people, and empowering their views/voices into the system. Not to mention a clear actionable way for channeling the relationships and discussions done online into the real world for social change.

To that effect I stumbled onto this site- http://www.rizzleweb.com. It seems to have a very interesting concept of allowing everyday people to rate their congressmen/senator etc. (kind of like an employee does for an employer). Reading on their blog, it seems they are currently building a stronger site with increased focus on social networking, and also an interface which will allow people to forward their performance reviews/ratings directly to congressmen and senators. I could be wrong, but it’s interesting to ponder if this could be the Google of the political social networking world….

With Hotsoup, as with many things the devil lies in the details. The fact is from the get go they have had a very poor implementation of the project. The final nail in the coffin I believe was laid with the structure of the site. Having organized the site around opinion drivers and everyone else they have imposed a hierarchy, which flies in the face of the egalitarianism that has made social networking sites successful. Within a site like Myspace, I can meet and converse with pretty much anyone I want. Hotsoup has taken a completely different route by filling press releases upon press release of celebrities who are “going to join” the conversation. It has created an unreal expectation that one will have a chance to converse with say Bill Clinton about social security. (As a side note -I might ask who would really want to converse with the so called opinion drivers? you pretty much know what they are going to say most of the time anyways. The more interesting discussions I believe take place with real people. For example talking with a intercity school teacher about the best method to fix our public schools…) Although the chances of Clinton actually taking to me about how to fix social security within a form such as hotsoup are slim. As it is he has much better things to do-such as getting AIDS medicine to people in Africa.

In the end though I think you are right-having realized this, Joe Lockhart and Co. might be trying to sell the site to MSNBC.

So by signing up with MSNBC, HotSoup is already a success, despite everything else. Now they could tap MSNBC’s resources to improve the website and maybe locate an audience. More cynically, they might try to sell it off and wash their hands of the project.

MSNBC is hoping to garner stronger interest in discussion surrounding political issues, and subsequently stronger ratings for its political coverage, through its new partnership with HotSoup. HotSoup is a Web site which facilitates public policy and po…

I question the intelligence of the idea to begin with. But the execution is so atrocious they aren’t even giving themselves a chance.

The part I found most bizarre is that there is no way to add someone as a friend in the networking area of the site. Isn’t that the point?