Formspring launches ‘Interests’ in move toward revenue. Formspring, the social Q&A site, has built up a big following in the two years since it launched. The website sees more than 30 million unique visitors each month, and now there are 27 million registered users who frequent Formspring to ask and answer questions with their friends, and a collection of celebrities who interact with fans on the site. Even with all that traction, Formspring has taken its time when it comes to making money. The company has tasked its 30-person staff with developing new features and lining up celebrity users rather than on populating the site with advertisements. But now the company’s revenue strategy is starting to take shape with a new initiative called “Formspring Interests.” All about Interests Starting Tuesday, Formspring will start letting users add up to six interests to their profiles such as music, fashion and beauty, gaming, sports, and celebrity gossip.
A big step toward real revenue. Formspring Names Ro Choy COO; Has Answered Three Billion Questions To Date. It’s been a big month in the Marino-Choy household. No sooner did Lisa Marino get promoted to CEO of the would-be comeback-kid RockYou, than did her husband Ro Choy get named COO of the surging Q&A site Formspring. Choy’s roots go back to RockYou as well where he was chief revenue officer, before leaving in 2010 to become CEO of Peerpong. Peerpong didn’t last, primarily because its question and answer product failed to delight users, Choy says. His new employer doesn’t have that problem.
For all the hype and attention Quora gets thanks to its Valley-centric audience, high-quality responses, sky-high valuation and Facebook mafia pedigree, Formspring is way bigger. The site has more than 20 million monthly uniques and 3.5 million unique visitors per day. About three billion questions have been answered on Formspring to date, and about one million people respond to a question every day. The Kids Are All Right. Formspring Pageviews Are Up 65 Percent Since September. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a blooming of new Q&A sites which are both social and informative. While Quora gets a lot of our attention here at TechCrunch because of the quality of the answers it generates, it is still tiny compared Formspring, Stack Overflow, and most of its other competitors.
Formspring, in particular, is killing it once again after a drop-off in activity in the middle of last year. According to comScore, Formspring had an estimated 1.1 billion pageviews in January, up 65 percent from September, and almost back up to its peak of 1.3 billion last May. Formspring also attracted an estimated 19 million unique visitors worldwide in January, compared to 3.1 million for Stack Overflow and only 496,000 for Quora. (Albeit, Quora’s visitors grew nearly 90 percent from December to January alone, compared to 5 percent monthly growth for Formspring. Formspring is much lighter and less intimidating than Quora. Formspring’s Marketing Moment Comes With Its First Promoted Question Of The Day. The Kids Are All Right. Formspring Pageviews Are Up 65 Percent Since September.
Q&A Site Formspring Lands Another $10 Million. Q&A site Formspring, which raised $2.5 million in Series A funding back in March, reportedly closed its Series B this morning in a $10 million round led by Geoff Yang at Redpoint Ventures. This most recent financing pegs the company at a $45 million dollar valuation. Formspring is yet another player in the Q&A space piquing investor interest. Since its launch in November, the service now boasts over 16 million registered members, 40 million monthly uniques and around one billion questions answered. Quora, another buzzed about Q&A site, is much much smaller at a modest 200,000 monthly uniques. Formspring plans to use the cash to focus on building out more social integration into its service.
Its first financing round attracted such hot angel investors as SV Angel, Travis Kalnick, Kevin Rose and Dave Morin. Formspring. Back in January, I wrote about a new Q&A service called Formspring.me that allowed users to have their friends “ask them anything”: sign up for a profile, and anyone can submit a question that you can choose to answer at your discretion. At the time the service had around one million users. Fast forward six months: the service now has over 12 million accounts and users have asked each other 700 million questions.
According to Quantcast, it’s the 61st most visited site in the United States. Formspring has also just launched a preview of its API in private beta, which you can request an invite to here. As it has taken off, Formspring has started to draw the attention of some major brands — last month, Fiat used it to help launch the Uno in Brazil, and Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort regularly takes to the site to answer fan questions (he’s responded to over 3,000 of them). Red Bull has just launched a new page. Formspring CEO Addresses Suicides, Business Model, And Tumblr's Failed Clone. Kissing Frogs: Lean Startup: Early Testing Using Ads and Splash Pages. First, a bit of background. While in school I had this idea about a tool to help with networking, something to replace the excel spreadsheet I was using to track contacts. Recently the urge to scratch that itch became too great and so after years without writing any code I picked up a book and began to learn ruby.
I spent a few weeks over Christmas coming up with a bare bones prototype, and I was feeling pretty good. Jason Freedman, the CEO of FlightCaster, and I were having coffee and I told him what I was up to. His immediate reaction was "have you read 4 Steps to the Ephiphany? " Since I hadn't read it at the time Jason went on to quickly explain that I should try to iterate my idea as much as possible, and that I could begin without any code. Since one can't run adwords without at least a landing page, I went and grabbed an open source website template and put it up on a server I had. The first ads I created didn't do too well. Here I started to see something a bit more promising. Sean Parker (Napster, Facebook) Sees a Bright Future for Chatroulette. Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook, spoke on stage at the Techonomy conference today and disclosed that he is now working with the live video service Chatroulette.
He shared a vision of the company evolving into a metric-driven live performance publishing tool. "Nobody's nailed live video yet," he said. Skeptics might wonder whether Chatroulette, revolutionary in its user experience but infamous for explicit sexual acts, has come any closer to nailing live video than others have - but Parker sees room for more sophisticated analysis of user behavior to change the way the service works. "Chatroulette is eliminating all approach anxiety, there's no adverse signaling. You're just thrust into a conversation with people. Right now it's one to one, but you can imagine a one-to-many approach there, too. Do you buy that? Facebook, YouTube, Skype, ‘Mad Men’ Style. Because it’s Friday; Brazilian ad agency Moma has created the above ’60s style ads for web services Facebook, YouTube and Skype.
Part of the “Everything Ages Fast” campaign for Maximidia Seminars, the ads are visually stunning and the copy is eerily evocative (“Skype, The fabulous voice system able to put your family together”). Or maybe that’s just the quirky Portuguese to English translation? Sean Parker, of Napster & Facebook, Sees a Bright Future for Chatroulette. Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook, spoke on stage at the Techonomy conference today and disclosed that he is now working with the live video service Chatroulette. He shared a vision of the company evolving into a metric-driven live performance publishing tool.
"Nobody's nailed live video yet," he said. Skeptics might wonder whether Chatroulette, revolutionary in its user experience but infamous for explicit sexual acts, has come any closer to nailing live video than others have - but Parker sees room for more sophisticated analysis of user behavior to change the way the service works. "Chatroulette is eliminating all approach anxiety, there's no adverse signaling. Do you buy that? New Curation Tool is Out: Curatr. Google & Verizon Propose Enforceable Net Neutrality. Google and Verizon held a press call today announcing a joint legislative framework proposal: internet network transparency and FCC enforcement with up to $2 million fines for network providers that engage in anti-competitive measures that hurt consumers. This is the exact opposite of what reports last week speculated the companies were working on. (Note: broadband specialists and other press are very skeptical, see below.)
Under the proposal, the General Accounting Office would report yearly to congress about how well it all is working. Verizon said the company was concerned that too many rules up front could infringe on its ability to optimize the network for performance, but that some rules are clearly needed and transparency is important. “There will be no prioritization of traffic from Google over the internet, period,” Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg said today. “No paid prioritization of traffic over the public internet.” More analysis coming, the document is embedded below. Here’s The Real Google/Verizon Story: A Tale of Two Internets (UPDATED) | Epicenter Google and Verizon announced a joint proposal on Monday that would allow ISPs to offer premium content bundles over an unspecified global network — an unexpected gambit that would seem to call for separate and unequal internets.
The two companies say the guidelines would ensure that no internet traffic of any kind is prioritized over any other kind (with the exception of viruses, spam and the like). “There should be a new, enforceable prohibition against discriminatory practices,” reads part of their proposal, posted on both Verizon’s and Google’s websites. “For the first time, wireline broadband providers would not be able to discriminate against or prioritize lawful internet content, applications or services in a way that causes harm to users or competition.” “Our proposal also includes safeguards to ensure that such online services must be distinguishable from traditional broadband Internet access services and are not designed to circumvent the rules,” it continues.
[Story continues] Network Neutrality: Why The Silence From Vint Cerf, Father Of Internet And GOOG Senior VP? Posted by Tom Foremski - August 10, 2010 Why is Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet Evangelist and father of the Internet silent on this issue of Internet neutrality? It's an issue that has blown up over the past few days yet Mr. Cerf has been absent. Just over a year ago, Mr. Cerf wrote this on the Google public policy blog: Allowing a handful of broadband carriers to determine what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the features that have made the Internet such a success, and could permanently compromise the Internet as a platform for the free exchange of information, commerce, and ideas. ...we believe that providers should have the flexibility to manage traffic congestion and malware on their networks in non-discriminatory ways.
Today on the same blog, Google and Verizon have thrown out these principles when applied to wireless broadband! This is a bullshit excuse. (The lighting was bad so I turned it into a high contrast video.) Hacker News | Ask HN: Did you ever do anything unethical to get your startup off the ground? A lot of mixergy interviewers say that in the early days they've done things that would be considered unethical in order to get their sites off the ground.
A good example of this would be Facebook, which has done a ton of things early on. So have you yourself(or the company you worked for) done anything that would be considered unethical to get the business off the ground? (if you are worried about your reputation just use a throwaway account) This may involve: - spamming comments to get links/users - creating a ton of pages with keywords to get long tail google traffic - scraping other's websites to fill your DB - putting up an order page when your site wasn't ready - putting up 235 users online when you only had one - pretending to be bigger than you were - voting up your own submission on HN/Digg/Reddit - creating a fake back story to make your startup interesting(we just want to save the world, we don't care about money) - astroturfing your site with fake accounts - etc.