Minong youth manages 2,000 friends at Thirdie

Pete Merrill of Minong, a Northwood senior, created the social website Thirdie.com because was annoyed at the trend toward recruiting at other well-known websites such as MySpace and Facebook. He wanted a site that was solely about communicating with friends. His site is getting a lot of positive buzz, including comments such as this from Torontocitylife.com: “I’ve seen a number of ‘social’ sites that are either slapped-together Nign networks or just some terrible web page plastered with ads. This site, however, is clean, nicely organized, easy to navigate, and is genuine and honest. If only other sites were more like this one.”

BY FRANK ZUFALL, SPOONER ADVOCATE

But here are a few things to consider – MySpace is only 6 years old, Facebook is just a year younger, and Thirdie is barely out of the cradle but already taking off like that alien/human creature in the movie Species, one day an infant, a few days later … several feet taller and sprinting across the landscape like a gazelle.

What is remarkable about Thirdie, is that Merrill, 17, created the website when he was a junior in high school, with free software he pieced together from the Internet. After 1,500 hours of effort, he created a site youths from all over America and the world are gathering to meet, make friends, share thoughts, play computer games, and become another online community.

A quick preview of Thirdie’s members page, 60 sections long, reveals a cadre of teenagers and a few “really, really old” people in their late 20s and few in their early 30s.

If you are scratching your head and wondering what this social website is, it is a good bet that you are not a teenager. Merrill said more than 95 percent of the teenagers he knows are a member of a social website and they access a site daily, sending messages and updates to their friends.

A social website is a reflection of ongoing development and use of the Internet and wireless technology to create an electronic community that includes others identified as friends. Communication is maintained by posting e-mails, blogs, instant messages, photos, videos, and whatever tomorrow’s inventions will allow.

Thirdie receives around 9,000 hits monthly, and in August the site grew by 300 percent. Not bad for a site that has been active for only six months.

Merrill said approximately 22 new members join daily, and he projects membership will be more than 8,000 by the end of the site’s first year – or if the positive buzz grows, it is possible as many as 32,000 could join.

Like many youths, Merrill is also a member of Facebook and MySpace. It was through those well-known websites he recognized a trend toward recruitment towards other sites he disliked.

“I was tired of being prompted always to join or participate in an app [application] invites sent to me by my friends,” he said. “I only wanted to directly talk to people without spending time on social apps.”

His desire to create a pure social community of friends and not a pool to cull potential clients was Merrill’s motivation for creating Thirdie.

He also had an interest in graphic design and interactive websites and had created a Web page for his father’s store, but a social website is much more complicated.

With a genuine interest and a good search browser, all it took to begin was hitting the return key on “How to create a social website.”

The Minong youth pulled it off by creating a social website that is easy to access and use.

Merrill said Thirdie.com recently was valued in an online appraisal at just under $5,000, but considering the 1,500 hours he has logged and the sometimes six hours a day he puts on the site making sure members are keeping it social and keeping it clean, he figures if he sold the site he would have earned less than $6 an hour.

However, Merrill also is aware that another website created by another young person such as himself, called YouTube, recently sold for $1 billion. Who knows, maybe years from now Minong will be known for its “famous son,” Pete Merrill, the creator of Thirdie.

Features of Thirdie

Events – a calender maintained by the users of Thirdie. They can add events such as band showtimes, anniversaries, and birthdays.

Get your badge – a way for members to promote their profiles on other social websites. They copy and paste HTML code and click “save” to get a unique image or badge prompting others to “add their thirdie.”

Videos – a page for posting videos and comments on clips.

Members – an area that displays all members of Thirdie and allows searching for friends and learning who logged in or joined recently.

Personal profiles –  a place where members can upload a photo of themselves and fill out a form describing themselves; an area for recent activity, comments, messages, and adding friends.

Sidebar updates – a column showing updates on recent topics, blogs, new members, and videos. The updates show how many minutes ago an item was posted, who posted it, and how many hits it received.

Other featured pages: Talk (posting site for photos or videos, links, and talking), Music, Games (20 different games), Topics (chat room on topics), Sandbox (blogging site), and Wiki (a place to edit and add personalized pages, similar to wikipedia.org).

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