Tokoni means ‘help’

I’ve just signed up for an account on Tokoni, a Web 2.0 service that mixes blogging and social networking. After registration, I got the perfunctory welcome email with an explanation that their name means ‘help’ in the Tongan language. Here’s an excerpt:

We’re excited that you want to share your stories with the Tokoni community. In case you are wondering, Tokoni is the Tongan word for ‘help.’ Of course, you may not think of sharing your story as helpful to another person, but you never know. There may be someone out there who needs to connect with someone who has a story like yours.

So, it’s all about sharing stories for those who don’t have time to be bothered with installing plugins or messing around with theme templates. Share your story (which is really not very different from blog posts) and, if you like, link it with similar stories in Tokoni “hubs”.

Hubs are like top-level categories and they’re where you can connect with like-minded Tokonites. And like Facebook and other SNS sites, you can add friends to your network.

It’s not a very novel idea, but it has promise. If it succeeds in appealing to a niche audience, then it’ll most probably survive and not fall into TechCrunch’s deadpool. Currently, there are still less than a thousand members (I clicked on the ‘members’ link and, in the following page, there was a line saying “Displaying 1-20 of 572″), so it’s still pretty quiet in there.

If you love “front porch” storytelling (in front of a big audience), it’s possible you’ll appreciate Tokoni. Like one of the founders said, you never know, your story just might help somebody out.

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