YFLY.com Launch Party The Grand @ 41 East 58 th Street, NYC October 13th, 2006 Written and Photographed by Bob Bland Opposite photo of Danny Perkins, Nick Lachey and Drew Levin Courtesy of Fingerprint

Celebrities and social networking collided at the pre-opening of midtown hot spot The Grand on October 13th. The site launch celebration was for YFLY.com, a site that poses to be a celebrity-sponsored MySpace dedicated to Generation Y. Notable appearances were made by co-founder Nick Lachey, “Mean Girl” Lacey Chabert and former Olympic figure skater Oksana Baiul. The cast of a new reality TV show was filming during the party in a far corner, and they pulled in unfortunate partygoers for mock “interviews,” but if you avoided the cameras, the revelry was great. Drinks were free and the dancers got hot as the night went on, with music pumping around the VIP section in the center of the room.

Filming the Reality Show

YFLY.com launched originally last February as a site exclusively for teens where they could be “friends” with their favorite celebrities. In this new incarnation, YFLY.com has opened up to everyone. As Lachey describes it, “[I] have my own profile page on YFLY.com, where you can go there and check out the latest things going on with my life, with my career…I’m going to have a blog that will keep you guys updated with what’s going on.” One reason that Nick Lachey chose to promote YFLY is the concept of “certified” celebrities; unlike on MySpace where anyone can claim to be the former 98° frontman, YFLY actually calls each celebrity’s agent to confirm their registration on the site is authentic.

Oksana Baiul	Lacey Chabert

Catching up with Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer Danny Perkins, he felt that the launch party at The Grand “…brought all the right people together.” He said that when he and Drew Levins, the other co-founder, came up with the idea of YFLY at the University of Florida, they networked with Nick and found that he was frustrated with being misrepresented on the internet. Perkins feels that aside from the celebrity aspect of the site, what makes it better than MySpace is that YFLY incorporates “Facebook-style functionality” with multimedia features similar to YouTube and easier customization than MySpace to make pages more personal. Only time will tell whether this social-networking option will become as popular as MySpace or as dead as Friendster.