SortiPreneur

Grou.ps Funded for Growth

Grou.ps, in which I am a happy angel investor, has just announced a new tranche of financing from Golden Horn Ventures to help fund its explosive growth.  Grou.ps founder and CEO Emre Sokullu has been hitting all of his milestones since Grou.ps's Series A about a year ago.  This kind of growth is expensive and this new chunk of capital will allow Emre to focus on monetization opportunities, including tools for moderators to charge for their networks.

Congratulations Emre and the GHV team.

PS. This is also reported by Webrazzi in Turkish.   

E-Mail as an Owner of the Social Graph

While we are on the topic, I realized (reading Brad's new post) that I have been neglectin to mention a very significant current owner of the social graph:  e-mail.

I fully agree with Brad.  Along with a large swath of the social graph, e-mail also packs a ton of context with it.  Years ago, while building SelectMinds, we came across a company called Tacit (since acquired by Oracle) that attempted to abstract some of this context and social data out of enterprise e-mail.  I have no idea how the product faired under Oracle.  I can't imagine they are doing anything interesting with it, because otherwise, I think I'd have heard about it.

E-mail's also got a ton of attention.  I pretty much live in my Gmail account. It's the homepage on my browser. It knows more about me that any other property.

I am not very familiar with Gist (of the two companies that Brad mentions) but Xobni got a try for me.  However, after a year or so using Xobni in my Outlook (over which I still access a few IMAP e-mail accounts), I did not get much value out of it, so it did not survive my hard disk swap a few months ago.

I am looking forward to innovation that will extract some social data out of e-mail.

Facebook's Social Graph

Mark Zuckerberg's defined Facebook's future to Robert Scoble (paraphrased by the Alley Insider):

Because CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pretty sure the future of the company won't really be as a destination Web site, but as the Web-wide platform that connects us not just to our friends, but also the businesses we transact with.

We knew that.  We call it the social graph, of which there will be one owner, most likely candidate being Facebook.

Here We Go Spammers: Facebook Vanity URLs

I plan to write a longer post on my thoughts on this issue, but I am pushed for time right now, so this will be brief.

Facebook's decision to allow vanity urls/usernames is creating a landrush and is against its most basic premise:  all members are there with their real identity.  This can lead to spam-like messaging proliferation.  There have been discussions on how this will be good for SEO but that supports my point.  SEO is gaming the system.  In a liquid search environment, there should not be need for SEO.

The same's true for Twitter.  The landgrab of twitter usernames erodes Twitters authenticity.  And social media needs to be authentic to succeed.

Turkish Guide to Entrepreneurs Seeking VC

Çağlar Erol has kicked off a great series in his blog (in Turkish) going over typical VC terms.  This is something I have had in my "to-blog" list and it's long overdue.  I recommend every Turkish entrepreneur to read and digest.

Show Me Ads I Want

Google does a good job with this since it knows my intentions.  It's more difficult for the New York Times.  However, I spend a lot of attention on non-interactive media - wacthing TV shows, reading news on the web or playing games.  Some of that attention would be valuable to advertisers.

So here comes the "Digg for Ads" model.  It makes sense.  Jeff Jarvis does a great job of explaining why.

This may be one of the ways Turkish online advertising breaks through the rut it's in.

Nobody's Tweeting

The header is not true.  However, Twitter usage is shaping up as significantly different compared to other social media.  According to Harvard Business Review:

Twitter's usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

This is very very intriguing.  First of all, Twitter is growing faster than any previous social media property, in terms of users.  Look at this graph from Compete:

Yet, the new users are not tweeting.  The median number of tweets is 1!  This is mindblowing.  To me, this makes Twitter look more like a TV broadcaster than a true social media property.  These 20+ million Twitter users are all following Shaq and Ashton Kutcher, and maybe that's it.

The only business disruption of Twitter so far seems to be its assault on RSS.  Even with Google Reader, RSS had never broken into the mainstream.  Maybe it never will.

UPDATE: Jeremy Liew's picked up the same point and also remembered that Nielsen reported on Twitter's poor retention track record.

Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

I don't want to sound like a Twitter bear, because I am not.  I think Twitter's an example of the exciting opportunities the connectedness of the internet opens up.  However, we tend to group many things under social media these days and I suspect we're bundling models with very different characteristics.  I am trying to digest and understand the taxonomy and recognize the patterns.

Twitter Hyped by marketers?

A cool discussion emerged in the comments of Fabrice's latest post and I wanted to reflect it as a seperate topic here.

Fabrice proposed:

I am skeptical about all the hype around Twitter.
...
Comparing Facebook and Twitter, over 50% of Facebook’s 200 million active users login every day. 60% of Twitter users stop using it after a month. I personally find Facebook much more relevant to my personal life – I like seeing pictures, relationship status changes, etc.

In the comments, I pointed to an earlier post with my similar feelings and Chris Abraham, who seems to have a very well-developed perspective on Twitter, countered with a long comment:

...

Twitter does everything right where Second Life failed. Second Life was amazingly heavy, requiring lots of computer, lots of bandwidth, and a commitment to client software; SecondLife is a closed system, a walled city, completely invisible to serendipity and coincidence; Second Life is greedy, pushing avarice and commerce; Second Life is ephemeral and anti-textual, meaning that all of the work and all of the energy one spent on Second Life invariably went away the moment people stopped investing time and money into the platform.  While there was a programming language, a scripting language, and lots of room for creativity, Second Life was not nearly as agnostic and open a platform as it could have been.

On the other hand, Twitter is open, has a fantastically generous API (Open API as opposed to a Closed API), Twitter is highly textual, highly “contagious,” and very much real time.

...

In many ways, the Twitter platform has become almost a fungible INPUT / OUTPUT flow of data, like IP or like tap water, or like the electrical mains — all the creativity and all of the development is happening as a result of this relatively featureless and structureless raw platform.

Everybody admits that the elegance of Facebook’s interface does an amazing job of hand-holding the diverse levels of technological prowess that Facebook users posses; however, Facebook shares many things in common with Second Life: it is a walled-garden, it is very cliquey and very hard to cross-pollenate, and finally — Facebook works very hard at defining what the user experience is to the best of its ability in a world where openness and open access can oftentimes work for you instead of against you.

...

People who don’t get Twitter really have not spent enough time with it.  There are tons of ways people can use Twitter.  Many people use Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed news reader, following the Twitter feeds of news organizations and news alerts, including links and so forth. Twitter doesn’t care how you use it: passive reading or active conversation.

In fact, Twitter is such a neutral solution that you might very well forget that you’re a member, which is why there might be a perception that over 60% of all of the users who register never go back: Twitter doesn’t want to be too much trouble.

...

Then the discussion between Chris and me veered over to the (to me) surpisingly high median age of Twitter users (31!, according to Pew), and what it meant for Twitter.  I think it's alarming and feel that it's an indication of the value of the social graph that is owned, at this pointi by Facebook.  Chris feels differently:

Well, “kids” don’t blog either. Kids won’t blog until they feel empowered enough to start creating on their own accord or until they find it useful — hell, “kids” might never ever take to Twitter, except that they will want to engage with TMZ Staffers on Twitter (@harveylevintmz @daxholt @ninaparkertmz @lmharris70 @carolynafenton @frankvelardo) because there will be loads of kids who will get on board to be able to stalk their favorite celebs and stars. But who knows. Rockers and fans are still on MySpace and the “kids” have yet to bail on Facebook (yet) so we’ll see what happens. It is very odd to see how the median age for blogging and twittering is much older than you would think: “the median age of a Twitter user is 31. In comparison, the median age of a MySpace user is 27, Facebook user is 26 and LinkedIn user is 40.7,” according to Pew, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Twitter-and-status-updating/Part-1/Section-3.aspx?r=1

Anyway, I think this is a very interesting issue.  It makes me think about the lack of microblogging interest in Turkey, especially given the enormous usage of SMS.  How does age play into it?  Do you need a social graph for presence communication?  Is Twitter being hyped by marketers, because it resembles a new, relatively unstructured, medium they can utilize for their clients/constituents?

What's Wrong with Twitter that Kids won't Use It?

Caroline McCarthy of CNET reports:

While 99 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on social networks, only 22 percent use Twitter, according to a new survey from Pace University and the Participatory Media Network.

This is very interesting to me and I can not figure it out.  Is Twitter just a simple status updater for those who are not fully comfortable with Facebook?  Should it be a feature?

Turkey has 7th Largest and Most Engaged Online Audience in Europe

Anyone watching the Turkish internet market would not be surprised by this press release from comScore today. 

“The online population of Turkey far surpasses the rest of Europe in terms of time spent and content consumed per person,” said Mike Read, SVP and managing director, comScore Europe. “Much of this heavy engagement is driven by usage of social networking and entertainment media sites, which maintain users’ attention for extended periods of time. There are certainly excellent digital marketing and advertising opportunities in reaching these 17 million Internet users who are so engaged with the medium.”

Turkey's sheer size is a factor here but old media's lack of innovation will continue to drive the young masses online, just as Facebook demonstrated.  Monetization of this massive level of engagement is not mature yet, but will follow.

This is an exciting day for Turkish internet.

PS:  Congratulations to our portfolio company, GittiGidiyor, for its placement in the Top 15 properties list.