Social Networking

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with Ran Zilca. Ran is the CEO of NY-based Signal Patterns, a company that is helping people with real user discovery. Signal Patterns provides a set of social Web applications and widgets that categorize users by the use of surverys. The company is currently in private beta since June 2008 and you can check out additional reviews on RWW, Inq and Mash.

Signal Patterns has 4 senior scientists on staff to make sure that the matching process is as precise as possible. Currently they have a Facebook application, "Personality Patterns" which helps you find others like you and compare you to another person. What makes this application so interesting to me is that it offers true user discovery. It will find people across Facebook that match your survey, not just people already on your friends list.

They offer a personality test and a music test and plan to integrate into other social networks including hi5 and imeem. There are also widgets that can be embedded directly into a Web site to provide the matching service for any site.

Back in May we spoke with another survey company, Peanut Labs. The difference between the companies is Peanut Labs is providing surveys for companies looking for user feedback while Signal Patterns is providing surveys to help with user discovery.

The Personality Patterns Facebook application is live and you can use it today. If you would like a beta key for the Signal Patterns Web site, use this link. I am always impressed when companies are trying to help with real user discovery and aren't based on a popularity contest.

Here's a cute video about how the Signal Patterns service works:

Pingdom has released a new report about traffic trends across a variety of social news sites. The sites included in the report are: Digg, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Newsvine, Fark, Dzone and Sphinn.

What the report shows is that while so many sites focus only on Digg, there are other players that are still worth working.

Here are the findings:

• Traffic-wise, Digg.com stands heads and shoulders above the other sites in this survey, but they seem to have reached a plateau. They have roughly the same number of visitors now compared to a year ago.
• Mixx.com has the most aggressive growth curve. Propeller.com (previously hosted on the Netscape.com domain) is also growing fast, doubling its traffic in the last year.
• Slashdot.org (the original) is losing visitors. They have roughly 25% less visitors now compared to a year ago.
• The five largest based on website visitors (sorted, largest first): Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Slashdot.org, Propeller.com and Fark.com. (Reddit.com is in 6th place, and is about to overtake Fark.)

The report uses Google Trends for the raw numbers. It's clear the Digg traffic needle is stuck in neutral. Also, whatever happened to Newsvine? The service were acquired by MSNBC last October and haven't been in the news since.

Just what does Drama 2.0 do? One of activities I'm most heavily involved with is the trading of financial instruments (primarily option contracts). Trading is a wonderful exercise not only because there's a lot of money to be made (and lost, of course) but because the most powerful human emotions - fear and greed - are grappled with an on almost daily basis.

There are a lot of life lessons to be learned and many of the "rules" of trading can be applied to the world of technology entrepreneurship, especially in a day and age where startups are built to be "flipped" and entrepreneurial employees jump from one startup to another in search of the "big hit." Here are several trading "rules" that can be useful for technology entrepreneurs.

The Trend is Your Friend

In the startup world, spotting market trends in technology isn't as easy as looking at a trendline on a price chart but it's not too difficult either.

Most savvy and experienced entrepreneurs have a good sense of trends. They know which markets are meeting needs and seeing the creation of potentially valuable businesses, they know which markets are seeing increasing inflows of investment capital and they know which markets have a healthy level of M&A interest or activity.

While most entrepreneurs want to get into hot markets before they're hot because there is the perception of greater profit potential, it's worth noting that in the financial markets, the average investor only makes money in the middle of a trend. This is often called the "meat of the move." As such, entrepreneurs should consider that they don't necessarily have to try to predict new trends and can instead place their bets when a trend has been established.

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Last month we wrote about the "FriendFeed 9" which were the 9 defaults that FriendFeed offers to each new account. FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit says that only a few people actually see this default list because most new accounts are referred from someone else which eliminates this default list all together. I am not sure I agree with that - when the early adopter blogs posted about the new beta last week, how many new signups did FriendFeed see via direct links - I will bet that it's most of them. In fact, the number must be great to the default list because default user Scoble noted yesterday that he can tell when FriendFeed is doing well in terms of user growth simply by how many new subs he gets via the default option.

With the launch of the new beta this week, I thought it was a perfect time to take a look and see where the FriendFeed 9 are now and whether they made any changes to the structure. The FriendFeed 9 is now the FriendFeed 24 - that's the only change that has been made. The list is completely popularity based, not activity/usage based. This type of popularity list means that the 24 selected individuals will always appear on the list.

This is a very poor way to pimp people - it shows that FriendFeed doesn't give two knishes about their loyal and active users. This is pretty clear because the most active FriendFeed user Mona (her blog) isn't even on the list.

Here's my video on the subject:

Robert Scoble says he wants off the list and in Louis Gray's post today about the new FriendFeed he discusses this popularity list. He notes, "22 of those users were men, 22 were white and there were two Asian (one male, one female)".

All these popularity lists do is keep the top on top (without any quality backing) and never allow for any user/content discovery. I hope that FriendFeed will look into changing their default policy in the near future. I wrote this post and video because I think every startup should consider the lessons learned here for their own projects.

A new startup out of Philadelphia has launched and their goal is to help you create a reputation. Anthillz creates profiles based on testimonials and reviews written by colleagues you trust. There's also the ability to write reviews of users based on their work performance. The profile contains a photo, basic skills information along with links to Web sites and porfolio information.

To add a review of a person on Anthillz, you create a "Trusted Colleague" relationship. To complete the process, both you and the colleague must write reviews of each other. This is different than most other systems which allow one-way reviews. While I get the idea of writing two-way reviews for colleagues, how would that work in a client-consultant relationship? I want my clients to leave reviews for me, but should I be forced to leave them a review just to get mine to show up?

Anthillz allows you to enter your LinkedIn profile address but I'd prefer that the profile was included directly on the page. Anthillz should aim to create the most overall in-depth profile possible if they are to compete with LinkedIn.

From a marketing perspective, reviews should be sent back to LinkedIn and linked to the Anthillz profile. This could be a way to get LinkedIn users to learn about what Anthillz has to offer. I'd also like to see a user widget so I can place my latest reviews and ratings directly onto my Web site. This would help users spread their profile and also spread the Anthillz name.

I like the direction that Anthillz is going but to win at the ratings and reputation game, they need to make sure that they offer enough tools and services for a user to want to show off their Anthillz profile over (or next to) other services like LinkedIn.

"Female beauty showcase" site Zivity has apparently pulled the age verification requirement for new members. When I (and others) attemped to signup back in February via a Techcrunch invite link, we were prompted to enter credit card information. Zivity noted that the credit card information was used to verify that a member was over the legal age as Zivity has some nudity on the service.

Yesterday I received another invite (not requested by me) to Zivity and I clicked the link and sure enough the age verification was removed! I was able to signup directly and enter the site by just faking my age. I am not sure exactly when they removed the age verification but upon some searching, I haven't seen any reports as of yet.

When you signup for a Zivity account, you are provided with one "vote" (invited members receive two votes). Votes are the way that Zivity, the photographers and the models make money. You buy packs of 10 votes for $10 and then distribute the votes to the photographers and models you think have created the best photos. Zivity says the "artists" get 80% of every dollar spent on Zivity - not sure how that percentage is split between the photographer and the model.

From my browsing today, most of the members have used either their free vote(s) or no votes as of yet. The Zivity staff have placed what appears to be hundreds (or more) of votes across the site. It would be interesting to see how many actual paid votes have been placed (outside of Zivity staff and photographers). Here's a short example of founder Cyan Bannister's recent vote activity:

Photo sets are viewable only and you aren't paying for the ability to download full hi-res images like you can on most other "female beauty showcase" sites. I clicked on a random variety of models and I'd guess about 30% of the images on the service show any nudity. Zivity recently raised $7 million in venture capital funding.

Last week I posted an article where I discussed a variety of online ads from Singlesnet. In the ads they state, "". The ad I included in the video showed the profile of "SarahC_1225". Since that posting, I've received between 35-100 unique visitors per day coming from the search engines. Each query is for the term SarahC_1225. Nearly 700 unique visitors total in the last week.

Singlesnet has lost a golden opportunity to capitalize on searchers looking for information about this "Sarah" person. If you check out the Google results for the term, Singlenet isn't listed at all. If they were smart, they would create landing pages for every fake persona they create. This would allow them to own the search engine result and drive traffic back to Singlesnet. While I don't believe most startups are creating fake personalities like this, you should always consider the terms and the phrases that your startup might rank for. Blogger buzz dies off quickly while search engine traffic is the complete opposite, building slowly over time. Don't lose your chance to market to 700 new people this week because you weren't thinking about properly marketing your company.

Here's SarahC_1225 and her friend, SarahH_1221:

TravelMob is a new startup doing for group travel what Evite does for group events. TravelMob CEO Adam Smith notes that the service includes customized trip homepage, the ability to invite people and manage RSVPs, upload important trip-related files, create a photo gallery, see top tours for your destination, and plan via message board. Going with the 2008 flow, TravelMob has a Facebook-style newsfeed so that trip attendees can be updated as others add information to the site.

I planned a trip using TravelMob to Las Vegas and found it the service easy-to-use. TravelMob is tied into the Sabre travel booking system so you can book air, hotel, car directly inside of TravelMob. If you book outside of TravelMob, there's an option to add booking details. There's an option to, "Jump on this Flight" so you can fly with other members of your travel group. I love Web apps that launch with a business plan. Selling bookings is just one way TravelMob can generate revenue.

TravelMob needs to go through the app and spell check and tidy up -- no reason to lose points on the dismount when the execution was good. I would also vote for linking to other sites for information on the selected destination. This will help the entire group get familiar with the location before arriving plus it can help with marketing as well. I'd also recommend that TravelMob work with conferences - this would be a great tool for people to coordinate conference trips.

Glogster has announced a few service updates today. Glogster is like blogging but it's glogging. No seriously. Basically you create "posters" using a Flash application by combining pre-made and user-generated content. Josh has a good review of Glogster from earlier this year. Josh notes, "Glogster has no inclination to go after people who want to write something every day. Instead, the site is geared toward the tween crowd, or anyone else who enjoys partaking in glitter graphics, or those strange greeting cards with dogs and cats that have been Photoshopped to have enormous eyeballs. That being said, using the right tools, Glogster users can create classy looking stuff with a distinct visual style, even if it's got a single-use, disposable life cycle of something like an e-card."

Today's announcement allows Glogster users to add YouTube videos to their glogs to bring more life to them than they could previously. The other major update offers users the chance to add live webcam videos into their glogs. Both of these additions should help Glogster to let their users show off their own personality more than before. While I can't see myself creating any glogs, for the right target and demographic, Glogster could do well. Compete has Glogster at 50k monthly visitors (U.S. only) and Google has Glogster at 120k monthly visitors (worldwide). Both charts show the numbers increasing month over month.

Here are a couple of the most popular "glogs":

Lotame has announced that they have raised $13 million in a Series B round of funding. Emergence Capital Partners, led the round with support from previous investors Battery Ventures and Hillcrest Management. Lotame notes that the new funding will be used to support product enhancements, marketing and business development efforts.

Lotame offers engagement advertising instead of the traditional online advertising. Sites using Lotame report user and usage data back to Lotame which in-turn Lotame uses to find advertisers to match the users and the social networking site engagement. We've seen lots of chatter about engagement advertising and getting away from ad buys based solely on raw numbers. This type of online advertising typically pays more because the advertiser is getting closer to the actual intended customer instead of blasting a message to everyone on the network.

Don over at Mashable has a lengthy look at Lotame. He notes, "I can’t fault Lotame’s intent on innovation. For the first time, advertisers can capture real data in real-time for a specific demographic that they really want to target. And although Lotame would be best-served working with larger organizations, it thinks it has found its niche and as it continues to grow, will continue to create a value proposition for advertisers that want to capitalize on the social networking space."

I am always excited to see companies challenge the current online advertising model and over-time it can help move the advertising conversation forward.