Lily Cole's Impossible: Will it join the long list of celeb "social sites" which crashed and burned?

Today, English model Lily Cole launched one of the “nicest” social networks ever - dedicated to people making wishes, and other people chiming in to help.

It’s a really, really lovely idea - a bless-her-cotton-socks idea. But when Lily met Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales to discuss the idea last year, I rather hope the old web warhorse offered one, simple piece of advice. “Don’t do it.”

Celebrities love social networks - of course they do. How else can they turn buying a new pair of sandals into a global news story? But when they launch their own, the wheels usually come of the bus. Sometimes spectacularly - and it doesn’t seem to matter if you’re A-List, B-List, or “Oh yeah, that guy.” Disaster still usually strikes.

Cole’s Impossible has at least hit the ground running - it already includes such “wishes” as, “I wish for a date with Lily Cole here in America,” and, “I wish for a Jeep Defender, and a snorkel”. Neither has been granted.

Remember Ricky Gervais’s Just Sayin’? No, of course you don’t. In a hissy fit gigantic even by Gervais’s standards, the comedian announced he was leaving Twitter forever (one of those statements up there with “I’m never drinking again” in terms of reliability), and striking out on his own with an audio-sharing network.

Twitter had “too many idiots”, Gervais growled - many of them his fans, of course - and announced a sound-sharing network which, would be “to radio what Twitter is to newsprint.”

As of this morning, radio stations are still broadcasting, and Gervais is back on Twitter, talking about cats. Also as of this morning, the Android app for Just Sayin’ now brings up a loading screen… and nothing else.

Gervais’s foray - folly? - pales next to novelist-cum-Tory MP Louise Mensch’s Menshn, a network eerily similar to Twitter, but with one key difference - messages were capped at 180 characters, not Twitter’s cramped 140.

Cue a mass defection? Not exactly. Tech blogger GigaOm’s piece, “Why I won’t be using Menshn, and why you shouldn’t either,” was one of the kinder reviews - and the site was marred from the start by odd rules such as the fact that users who mentioned Menshn on the network were banned.

In months, it closed, amid very public snipes between Mensch and her business partner - who was promptly arrested by Scotland Yard for possessoin of pornographic images.

Perhaps, though, the problem was that Mensch and Gervais weren’t big enough fish? Perhaps - but the real problem may be that sites such as Twitter require hundreds of millions of pounds of venture capital, teams of experts, and don’t rely on people liking one particular celebrity.

Even celebs on the “mega” scale can lend their names in vain. Justin Timberlake bought ailing music network - only five years ago the biggest social site on the planet for $35 million in 2012.

Rupert Murdoch, whose company famously bought MySpace for $580 million just before its plunge towards disaster, described Timberlake’s move as a “huge mistake”.

This, of course, won’t stop celebrities being wooed by techie types into creating their own versions of “Look at Me, dot com”.

Ex-rapper turned gangsta rapper turned preacher MC Hammer stunned crowds two years ago with something yet more ambitious - a rival to Google, fronted by a man largely famous for his extremely large trousers.

Wiredoo focused on “related” searches - with a slogan, “"Search once and see what's related."

Sadly, the “search once” part was all too apt - it went bust in 2012, one year after launch.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, GlobalWebIndex’s list of the world’s top 50 social networks does not include a single celebrity-fronted one - even Justin Bieber’s photo-sharing network built for selfies. If Bieber can’t beat such, er, “household names” such as Mig33, Nasza-Klasza an