Beyond Facebook: The Ri...

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Jay Jamison, a Partner at BlueRun Ventures , who focuses on early stage mobile, consumer and enterprise investments. He also serves on the boards of AppCentral , AppRedeem , Foodspotting , and Thumb . You can follow Jay on Twitter @jay_jamison or read his blog at www.jayjamison.com . With the pending public offering of Facebook anticipated to be the largest tech IPO in history , it’s an interesting time to think about where we go from here. Some say “social is done,” Facebook is all the social media anyone would ever want or need. Unquestionably, as it nears one billion accounts, in the solar system of social media, Facebook is the Sun — the gravitational center around which everything social revolves. But while some may pronounce that Facebook is all the social we’d ever need, users clearly haven’t gotten the memo. Instead, users are rapidly adopting new interest-based social networks such as Pinterest , Instagram , Thumb, Foodspotting , and even the very new Fitocracy . (Disclosure: BlueRun Ventures is an investor in Thumb and Foodspotting.) The numbers tell the tale around users’ appetites for these new interest-based social networks. Pinterest, the increasingly popular virtual pinboard, crossed 10M monthly unique users in the US in January 2012, achieving 8 digits worth of monthly uniques faster than any site ever, comScore says . According to Silicon Valley uber-investor Ron Conway, Pinterest is growing like Facebook 5 years ago . On Thumb, a community for instant opinions, user engagement has mushroomed in its short history. Users asking questions can expect to receive over 60 answers from other users within 5 minutes. As a result of this near instantaneous community engagement, Thumb’s average usage is currently second only to Facebook’s, and is far ahead of mainstream services including Pinterest and Tumblr, though on a smaller base. What accounts for the fast growth of these interest-based social networks, and what does it mean for Facebook’s future? Interest-based social networks have a markedly different focus and approach than Facebook. The Pinterest, Thumb and Foodspottings of the world enable users to focus and organize around their interests first, whereas Facebook focuses on a user’s personal relationships. Facebook offers us a social utility to deepen social connectivity with our existing social graphs, while these new interest-based social networks enable users to express their interests in new, engaging ways and offer authentic, high value connectivity with new people we don’t already know. The different approaches of these interest-based services are distinct from Facebook, and they are powering the massive growth and engagement we are seeing in these new services. On Pinterest, I can curate and express my interests in Crossfit , cars and architecture, giving me the ability to create a strongly personal identity that draws me into new social relationships with people on the basis of my interests. Similarly on Foodspotting, I can easily express my love for ramen , which in turn connects me with other ramen fans who aren’t in my current social graph. So if interest-based social networks focus first on an individual’s interest graph and Facebook centers on an individual’s social graph, which service will be the winner? Both. Humans are inherently social creatures, and we define ourselves both by the people we know and our interests. We make decisions about where to eat, what to buy, where to visit, etc based on a complex matrix of social relationships, past experiences, location, long standing interests and future goals. Today’s platforms approach our lives from different angles but both are integral to how we define ourselves and interact with the world around us. There are opportunities to establish differentiated, sustainable social media brands with large, passionate audiences. Much like the modern day media disrupters (e.g. ESPN or HBO or CNN), these services can establish new social media networks that are differentiated and unique, protecting them from the inevitable concern that they get squashed by Facebook. The traditional “Big 3 networks” (NBC, ABC, and CBS) used to be the only properties that really mattered, similar to how some view Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in today’s social media landscape. Emerging networks will be the new media brands and properties that augment social networking and media. At the same time, the rise of these new interest based social networks does not really threaten Facebook, in fact, they are more likely to benefit Facebook. Specifically, Facebook has evolved itself brilliantly into not only an end user application drawing near to 1 billion accounts but also a robust, powerful platform other apps can leverage in order to drive more users to their services. Pinterest, Instagram, Fab, and many others have adopted Facebook’s Timeline API for precisely the reason of wanting to raise awareness of their services and drive more users to their sites. As these new services grow, more content gets pumped back to Facebook, Facebook’s platform gets more robust. Wash, rinse, repeat… Facebook’s positive feedback loop gains more momentum, and becomes more powerful. In the words of Marc Andreessen, “Software is eating the world”, and in the world of social media, there is, for now, plenty of world to go around. Excerpt image credit MignonGameKit.org

Frank & Oak Helps T...

A new site called Frank & Oak wants to take the headache out of clothes shopping for men between 20 and 35. The site is a new product from men’s clothing company Modasuite (a startup based in Canada and backed by Real Ventures). With Frank & Oak, CEO Ethan Song says the company is aiming at a younger audience (Modasuite’s customer base is more in the 30-45 range), so the clothing is more affordable and the process is simpler. Subscribers just go to the Frank & Oak site and enter their clothing preferences. Then, once a month you get an email newsletter with a list of items for sale, curated to your interests — Song compares it to a personalized men’s fashion magazine. (At first, I thought a monthly newsletter didn’t seem frequent enough, but Song says men in their 20s and early 30s don’t want to buy clothes more often than that.) You select up to five items, which are then shipped to you free of charge. The ones you don’t like, or that don’t fit, you send back, and you pay for the ones you keep. The goal, Song says, is to create “the most hassle-free experience I’ve ever had.” This isn’t the first startup built around the assumption that men would rather get something shipped to them than have to go out shopping — the most extreme example is probably Manpacks, where men can sign up for deliveries of underwear, socks, and other necessities . Song says that a better comparison to ModaSuite/Frank & Oak’s business model would be a custom clothing site like  StyleMint  or a custom accessory site like ShoeDazzle , except focused on men’s clothing. Song also emphasizes that this isn’t a flash sale site, where companies are often trying to sell off excess inventory. Instead, Modasuite team designs the clothing, and it has direct relationships with the manufacturers. That means it can deliver high-quality products at a relatively low-price, he says — on Frank & Oak, shirts cost about $40 and accessories cost about $25. And yes, I realize that I could probably use some fashion help myself . Oh, and TechCrunch readers get a special discount. Enter the code “TECHGO” and you’ll get $10 off your next purchase.

Ampush Media Acquires O...

Ampush Media , an online marketing startup, has acquired Academic Earth , an online education video site that’s sort of like a “Hulu for Education” and a Bill Gates-favorite. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As we’ve written in the past, Academic Earth is a user-friendly, curated platform for educational videos that allows anyone to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 350 full courses and over 5,000 total lectures from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” Since the site’s launch in 2008, Academic Earth has grown to attract 400,000 unique visitors per month, primarily through word of mouth. Gates is a big fan of Academic Earth , and even mentioned the startup in his newsletter from the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, in 2010 as an idea that could help revolutionize online education. Ampush Media also works in the online education space, developing a technology platform that helps students identify higher education options that fit their interests. The company says it plans to invest heavily in building out social and interactive user features to Academic Earth and adding new lecture material to the site.

Harvard Study: Social N...

Here’s a bit of science that’s contrary to what a heavy utilizer of social networks might expect. Researchers at Harvard tracked the Facebook activity of hundreds of college students for four years, and came away with the rather unexpected result that the interests of friends don’t, in fact, tend to influence one another. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen at all, of course, but it’s clear that propagation and virality are subtler and more complex than some people (marketers and, I suspect, researchers) tend to think they are. But the study is also clearly flawed in ways that those versed in social graphs are likely to easily perceive. Pulling useful data from social networks is like catching lightning in a bottle, and I wonder whether the findings may in fact be, as the study attempts to avoid, “a spurious consequence of alternative social processes.” The central source of data for the study, in fact, doesn’t strike me as solid. Tracking the interests of college kids is a sketchy endeavor in and of itself, but tracking it via their Facebook favorites (i.e. what shows on your profile, not what you post about or share) seems unreliable. After all, not only does everyone use the network in their own way, but the network itself has changed. Putting Wilco in your favorites is a different act from liking Wilco’s Facebook page, their official band site, or posting their latest video. Gauging someone’s interest in a movie or band by the favorites factor alone is inadequate. Their findings are essentially that taste doesn’t diffuse the way you might expect. But while the data support this, nothing supports the data. Flattening huge sets of data and removing potentially conflative or distracting connections (“disentangling,” to use the researchers’ well-chosen word) is the bane of social research, and with a limited window on a huge field of data, like that these researchers had, it’s especially hard. Who among these people was a supernode? What were their Twitter counts? What was the most common unit of interest? How many total posts, how many total favorite changes, how many total friends? The process of disentanglement only gets harder and harder, and the amount of indispensable data grows. The researchers have used advanced statistical techniques, but the data they were interpreting doesn’t seem to be at all complete. The study does establish something that I think we perhaps understand is true already: you befriend people because of your overlaps in taste, but it’s rare that your existing friends change the tastes you already have. This is as much true out in the “real” world as it is online. It seems to me that taste doesn’t propagate because taste is rarely propagated to begin with. And on Facebook, the focus is not on the laying up of collections (increasingly all anyone even sees is news, not favorites), the collaborative appreciation of any item or media in particular (for the most part, your “likes” disappear into a vast ocean of other likes), or the influencing of others (there are supernodes and influencers, but Facebook isn’t the proper tool for the job). What propagates is individual items, events, songs, virals, and so on. To even collect, categorize, and weigh these collected items would not be to guarantee a meaningful result, since, as has been observed of the river, you never step into the same social stream twice. The status updates and comments of years past don’t strike me as a window into the soul of the user today. I have no doubt that some clever data divers and social archaeologists will find a way to make this data useful and powerful, but I don’t envy their task. The Harvard study does indicate another thing, which is that social networks are, for now, “light” social interaction. Breaking into a new genre of music, discovering a new favorite director, getting book recommendations, these things don’t occur nearly as much on social networks as their proponents and heavy users would like to think. That’s changing, but Facebook doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to make the change to “serious” social interaction: the kind of trusted exchanges you have with friends in conversation or in repeated encounters over years that slowly convert you into a fan of David Lynch, or Scarlatti, or David Foster Wallace. Those are still the province of real life, it seems, even among the Facebook generation. But for how long?

Twitter As Discovery Pl...

While Twitter is already a leading platform for information distribution, a few aspects of its redesign today show how it’s strengthening itself in this area. It’s improving inline media viewing and tweet embeds to aid viewing and sharing, and adding a personalized Stories section to help users more easily explore the wide world of tweets. The first, inline media viewing within tweets, is an adjustment from the way you could show media in the previous two-pane view. If a tweet in your home stream contains media, you can click on “View Photo” or “View Media” to reveal it without having to go to another page or pane. So, less clicking through panes, and more engagement as a result. If you share the location of your tweets, they’ll also appear here. Most interestingly, these inline views also appear to include third-party apps like FourSquare. Any app developer should think hard about how to take advantage of this new platform real estate. The second change is embedded tweets. While Twitter has offered a way to embed tweets for a year and a half through Blackbird Pie , the new version is more like YouTube, although more hidden in the interface. To get at it, you first click on a tweet to open it within the stream. Then you click on “Details,” the last link in the meta information in the tweet. This will take you to the landing page for the Tweet, which will then include the embed option. Once you open it, you’ll see a YouTube-style menu that includes HTML, shortcode and the link, as well as a way to adjust the alignment and a view of of what the embed will look like. The resulting tweet contains all of the context, including the Reply, Retweet and Favorite options. So happy to see @ twitter at the top of @ techmeme again techmeme.com #itsbeenawhile — Miguel Rios (@miguelrios) December 08, 2011 The third change is a conceptual shift: the personalized Stories section that’s the default of the new “# Discovery” page. Twitter has up until this point only shown raw streams of tweets, with the most advanced sorting mechanisms being lists. This new page is specifically designed to help users explore the world of Twitter, and it feels like a personalized newspaper. When I asked product managers at the company about how Stories are determined, the answer I got was a vague “your interests.” These interests are presumably who you follow, what you tweet about, what you click on, etc… I’m guessing they’re determined in a similar way to how Twitter figures out who-to-follow recommendations. The examples below, like the Virginia Tech shooting and Ice Cube, appear to be popular news stories that aren’t especially tailored to my interests, so we’ll see how Twitter refines this section in the future. But even if it’s not that interesting right now, this sort of algorithmically determined feature is that Twitter can quickly adjust it from this point forward to  match users interests. Stories feels like it could be especially useful for people who are relatively new to Twitter, who don’t fully understand all the parts of the service even if they know it’s a good place for discovering the information that matters to them. Check out the rest of our coverage of the changes today, in the links below: The New Twitter Brand Pages With Bold Banners And Pinned Videos @&#!!!! Twitter Wants To Own The Symbols With New Redesign Twitter Redesigns Around Four Concepts: Home Timeline, Connect, Discover, Me #LetsFly Live At Twitter’s “Come See What We’re Building” Press Conference #LetsFly