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Albourne Village, a site run by hedge fund advisor Albourne Partners, is a pseudo social network for hedge and private equity fund managers. They say the site has 47,544 users and has been around for ~7 years. From the looks of the site, they haven’t changed it since it was first built. It’s truly bizarre. Based on a “village” layout, different virtual buildings have different functions:

Like most villages, Albourne has a helpful map for visitors to use to navigate the winding streets and alleyways. With the aid of this map visitors can virtually walk along Albourne’s picturesque streets and explore the different style quarters. For those in a hurry or who haven’t found their bearings yet, the map provides direct routes to the principal locations of the Village. Many visitors tend to make a bee-line for the “old market square”, notable for its historic Town Hall and its impressive Library, before popping into the Bridge Inn for a quick pint and a friendly gossip with the local residents.

Users earn “apples” for submitting stories and posting on the message board – every user gets 500 when they sign up. There are currently 25,417,426 Apples in circulation. It is so difficult to navigate around the site that it is almost not worth investigating, but the service does product a very high quality weekly email newsletter aggregating news stories submitted by users. The message board also seems to get a lot of traffic, but it is almost impossible to read. The value of nearly 50,000 investment professional membership is huge, and the fact that the site gets any traffic at all with the current interface shows that users are getting real value from the system. The thought of hedge fund managers earning virtual apples they can cash in at the village pub is hilarious though. Albourne: if you want a site makeover, let me know. I know a guy.