Jimdo adds social features (Guide to Small Business Ecommerce)

Jimdo announced today that they’ve added social features to their web hosting tool. Take a look at the screencast:

What they’ve added looks similar (in a good way) to the types of activity sharing common within Facebook. For certain types of sites, these could be a real plus. For instance, a local bicycle shop, bookstore or club could get great value by incorporating an online social aspect to their site. Whether a lawyer or doctor (or any profession that must maintain its customers privacy; see Client 9), would find value is unlikely. But, these still represent an intriguing upgrade to Jimdo’s service. Mashable reports on Chris Pirillo’s attempt today to make a simple CMS and notes, “if you want simplicity, you lose on power and features; if you want power and features, then there’s not way it’s going to be simple.” While it’s tough to argue with the underlying sentiment, the features that Jimdo, and folks like Weebly, WordPress, and SynthaSite, provide offer greater power than you might expect. Are they for everyone? No. But they’re not a bad match for many people.

I’ve got an email out to Matthias Henze, Jimdo’s CEO, to learn whether Jimdo plans to join OpenSocial or something similar. One of the great benefits of social features such as these is allowing your customers to incorporate these items into other parts of the their online life. I’ll update once I hear more.

You can read the original review of Jimdo here and read the review of its competitors, Weebly, Webnode, Synthasite and Site Kreator, here.