Social startups need Facebook applications

The GigPark team launched our Facebook application yesterday. The app is completely integrated into our main site so it took some work. Launch was definitively a proud moment!

The GigPark app lets you ask all of your Facebook friends for a recommendation, let’s say you are looking for a plumber, and see all of their replies. The app is not invite only, like the main site, so please feel free to add it here.

So, why build a Facebook application when GigPark is only a few months old?

Two reasons:

1. Services like ours, that get better when more of your friends are involved, need to offer their service where your friends hang out – i.e. Facebook!
2. Short of a miracle, there is no faster way to grow

For us, Facebook is one of a few important places GigPark should be available. Since GigPark is all about finding services with the help your friends, we need to be where friends communicate. Facebook is definitely one of those places but there will be more in the future.

I believe being platform agnostic is the name of the game. Startups should see themselves as services that people can use wherever they like: On a website, within their favorite social network, through IM, on their mobile phone … . This is especially true for social startups.

There was a good quote from James Hong of Hot or Not about this on TechCruch last year:

“I have really stopped thinking of Hot or Not as a destination site and worry about how many people are using our service no matter where they are … People will go where they will go. The world is evolving.”

GigPark launches private beta

I’m extremely happy to let you all know that about 5 minutes ago we announced the launch of the GigPark private beta.

From the GigPark blog:

Pema, Paul, Tony and I are extremely excited to announce that we have a site ready. We’ve taken a page out of the brilliant book Getting Real by 37signals and kept it simple, but we think we have a fun and very useful application on our hands — a way for you and your friends to all receive great service by sharing recommendations.

Rather than start a publicity blitz, our plan is to introduce GigPark to a small group of people that we know and make it absolutely AMAZING for them. We are going to spend 100% of our time listening, building features the group asks for, and fixing problems they spot. We want to make a genuine difference in the lives of these people: hopefully giving them access to great new service people and allowing them to really help each other out.

The long term plan is that once this group is stoked on GigPark, we can take the walls down and get more people involved.

If you want to try GigPark, just ask and we’ll hook you up the next time we hand out beta codes.

And to our fantastic beta group, let the great service begin!

Wikis explained in plain english

Next time you’re trying to explain what a wiki is, or if you need a little clarification yourself, hit play on this handy little video.

Thanks for the link Bryce.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY]

Advice form Richard Edelman

Stuart MacDonald‘s final question to Richard Edelman during this morning’s Mesh keynote was: What three pieces of advice would you like everyone here to walk away with?

His answer:

1. Make your stories visual. PR people are great with words and not so great with visuals.
2. Don’t be defeated by setbacks. You have to fall a couple of times to ski fast (skiing was his analogy of choice).
3. Don’t let clients say ‘here is your little box’. There is this tremendous grey area. Be bold and assert yourself.

Sutori: Blast Radius goes to work for customers as well as clients

I was finally introduced to Sutori this week by a friend that works at Blast Radius, a digital agency with Canadian offices in Vancouver and Toronto. Sutori is a site that lets people rate products they buy and encourages corporations to participate and react to the feedback.

Sutori in their own words:

We believe that today’s customers have more power than ever. Power to make informed choices. To connect with each other and share unbiased advice, opinions and stories.

We’ve created Sutori to channel that power. To capture the stories that bind us all together in our shared lives as customers. And to make it easy for companies to listen to and learn from those stories.

Sutori was created by a small team at Blast Radius, and from what I can gather it was built on company time. I’ve always respected Blast from a distance for their commitment to innovation, good management and honesty. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve been told stories by current and past employees about how great their policies are and what a good working environment they have created. In fact, when I was editor at Dose magazine we wrote a story about what a great place Blast is to work.

But Sutori looks like a cool initiative even for a company like Blast.

The idea that the world is a different place now and that customers can talk back to corporations seems to be, unfortunately, still a pretty novel concept in the advertising world. Blast have obviously come to terms with this and have decided to create a dialog not just between their clients and customers, but between anyone and any corporation who will listen.

I hope that Blast are encouraging their clients to participate to Sutori: to listen to what customers like and what they don’t like about their products, and to react accordingly. I think that this will not only be the key to success for Blast’s clients, but also the key for Sutori. Sutori needs to be a place for customers to organize their opinions and then get corporations to listen, not just a place to complain. If they can achieve this then I think Sutori will gain momentum and become a valuable tool for all of us and all of the corporations who market to us.

I wish them the best of luck.

Appendix (can a blog post have an appendix?):

From Sutori’s FAQs here is a bit more info about them:

What is Sutori?

On Sutori, you can rate companies by posting stories about your experiences with them.

Each story is accompanied by a “goodwill rating”, which contributes to the goodwill meter—an aggregated view of how the Sutori community feels about each company.

When other users read your story, they have the option of leaving a comment or voting to agree or disagree with you.

To reflect the power of consensus, stories with many “agree” votes have a stronger impact on the goodwill meter. Similarly, stories with many “disagree” votes have less of an impact.

In addition to a centralized goodwill meter where companies can track how customers feel about them and why, Sutori also includes a mechanism whereby companies can post official responses to any story.

You can also check out the Sutori blog here.

Thanks for lunch eBay

I was lucky enough to go to an eBay Canada event today to meet Jeffery Cole from the Center for the Digital Future. Jeff spoke about the research he is doing on the social, cultural and media implications of internet usage and showed slides from his 2007 Digital Future Report.

He mentioned all of the points you’d expect in a presentation about internet usage:

Growth of user generated content:
> 21% of teens keep a blog, share photos or maintain their own website.
> Internet infrastructure not set up for all of this uploading – 6 megs per second download speeds and almost nothing up.

Significance of social networks:
> 43% of people on social networks say that their online connections are as important as their offline connections; 49% for teens.
> “MySpace are not going to keep their teenage users. For teenagers a social network is like a night club – when the uncool people show up they leave.”

The Internet influencing politics:
> 40% of Americans online feel they are gaining political power because of the web.

I asked if he thought we would see the same culture of star political bloggers in the 2008 presidential campaign or if he thought we might see something more widespread and grassroots. He talked about politicians needing to be more careful of what they say (i.e. citizen journalists are everywhere) but I’m not sure he answered my question.


I thought the two most interesting points he made were the most basic.

1. The ‘always on’ culture of broadband is changing how we use the web: We don’t log in now – we are constantly logged in. In fact, logging out now takes more of an effort. This completely changes our relationship with the digital tools around us.
2. Internet penetration is at 100% of those willing: His point was that today not having the internet at home requires more of a decision than having it. Penetration in the US and Canada still isn’t at 100% but it’s not because people have been slow to adopt, it’s because they are making a conscious decision to keep the web out of their homes.

Reuters (talks about) embracing citizen journalism

After working in the publishing business for 2 year I have a real interest in seeing how that industry deals with the shift toward social media and citizen journalism. So, it has been great reading some of the stories that have come out of the WeMedia conference in Miami.

One of the biggest hurdles for citizen journalism is the rift it has created between the people in charge of traditional media companies and the journalists that work for them. I found that it wasn’t uncommon for writers to feel that the only reason their organisations were interested in citizen journalism is because they could save money on reporting and lay off ‘proper journalists’. Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters, thinks it’s a confidence issue: “as soon as we get over this crisis of confidence we will realise that this is a golden age of journalism.”

In fact Chris had quite a few interesting things to say – there is a post about his speech on the Gaurdian’s OrganGrinder blog.

I think Reuters will play a particularly interesting role in the shift toward social media. The fact of the matter is that most media companies, particularly newspapers, are cash strapped. They are doing less reporting themselves and are relying more heavily on picking up syndicated stories from organisations like Reuters. If Reuters starts sending out citizen journalism over the wires it becomes easy for editors to simply start running it. This is in comparison to getting your own citizen journalism system off the ground – a massive undertaking for most news organisations.

I don’t think this is ideal – but it could be a good start. I’m a believer in news communities. I think citizen journalism works best when someone in a community writes for that community (either virtual or geographical). So with Reuters sending out citizen journalism ‘feeds’ they will likely be detaching the journalist from the community – which in my opinion makes it less powerful.

Still, if editors become comfortable running these stories I think it is a much smaller leap to start asking their own readers to contribute to their newspapers and TV shows in more meaningful ways. I’m optimistic.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned the other big piece of citizen journalism news announced at WeMedia: The partnership between NowPublic and Asociated Press.

From the press release: “Contributions to the AP news report from NowPublic’s network of participants could take many forms over time, said AP Deputy Managing Editor for Multimedia Lou Ferrara. “They could range from simple eyewitness accounts to originally produced content.”

Of course NowPublic is another Canadian startup – based in Vancouver. Great to see them doing so well.