What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn't

 

 

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What Pinterest is Doing That Facebook Isn't

via ReadWriteWeb by Alicia Eler on 1/30/12

Pinterest is growing fast, and 80% of the site's users are women ages 25-44.

Laura Skelton, owner of Prix-Prix, told me about Pinterest months ago when we met up one chilly Chicago morning for brunch. "Have you tried Pinterest?" she asked me with a glint of excitement in her eyes. I shook my head no. "Try it out, but be careful, you'll get addicted." I am always wary of that caveat because I do end up getting addicted. I decided to stop by just to see what was up. I registered for an account and then left. Everything looked too pretty. Then, a few months later, I started receiving a slew of notifications: "So and so is following you on Pinterest." It was around then that Pinterest blew up.

AdAge's David Teicher wrote about how Pinterest is driving traffic to sites like design magazine RealSimple. But more importantly, he writes, "the true potential in Pinterest may be in its ability to impact purchases, which is why retailers like Etsy, Nordstrom, and Lands' End have taken to developing a presence on, and strategy for, this new platform."

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It's easy for retailers to create visual storefronts that emulate the clean, easy-to-browse features of tablet commerce. "We view this [Pinterest] as another way to engage with customers rather than marketing," Nordstrom's social media manager Shauna Causey told AdAge. "Images are a great way to share ideas and trends in the retail social media landscape." Oh, and then there's the ease of commenting on photos of hot runway models who are wearing sexy, expensive clothing.

We've written about how Facebook is trying to make social commerce work. Or, in less market-y terms, how Facebook is trying to become a mall. The launch of Timeline social apps seemed like a step in that direction, as it included fashion and shopping apps from Fab, Oodle, Pose and Lyst.

Still, Pinterest is showing increasingly strong signs that it is a more effective as a social commerce platform. New data from Monetate show that referral traffic from Pinterest to the websites of five specialty apparel retailers jumped 389% from July-December 2011.

Only 1% of Facebook "fans" engage with brands. Will this change? Right now you can buy donuts and earn Facebook credits through a new loyalty program from Plink. Last year Facebook announced integration with eBay.

Still, Facebook wrongly conflates the social graph with the interest graph, assuming that if your friends like it you will, too. Facebook is organized around the social graph first, whereas Pinterest is focused on the interest graph. Sure, your Facebook friends are probably all on Pinterest, but the true focus of Pinterest is not social. It's interest. Users organize around interests, making Pinterest a natural space for shopping. The visual focus doesn't hurt that, either. Facebook is too focused on the user experience and social, which ends up making it a difficult space for shopping. Plus there's that whole, you know, user distrust over Facebook's long-standing privacy issues, including EPIC's latest request that the FTC look into Facebook Timeline's possible privacy violations.

For more on how businesses are using Pinterest, check out this story by ReadWriteWeb's Dave Copeland.

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Why Goodreads Gave Up on Amazon

 

 

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Why Goodreads Gave Up on Amazon

via ReadWriteWeb by Jon Mitchell on 1/30/12

Goodreads, the social network for reading and reviewing books, had to make a change this month. It moved away from its main source of book data, the Amazon Product Advertising API, citing its "many restrictions." It completed the transition to Ingram Book Company's data today, and it also draws from other open data sources such as libraries. The transition went smoothly, but Goodreads did lose some data. "Fewer than 2% of our 7 million users have books currently affected," Goodreads says.

The problem most visible to users will be missing cover images. Goodreads is in the process of uploading replacements. One percent of Goodreads books will appear blank, listed as "Unknown Title" and "Unknown Author," while Goodreads looks for a new data source for them. There's a great lesson here about building a business on top of a competitor's API, but Goodreads has made the switch in the nick of time.

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Why Amazon Stopped Working for Goodreads

Goodreads has risen farther and faster than its competitors, LibraryThing and Shelfari, except by one measure: Amazon bought Shelfari. This happened over three years ago, and Amazon has yet to do much with Shelfari. It launched Kindle Profiles last year without a Shelfari in sight. But to the extent that Amazon has invested in a social network for readers, it and Goodreads are competitors.

But at the end of the day, Amazon is a retailer and Goodreads is not. Goodreads built its business on Amazon's product advertising API, so there was no problem on Amazon's end. That API required Goodreads to link books back to Amazon, so Amazon made money and Goodreads got a cut, as well as a wealth of images and data about its millions of books.

But the usage requirements of the API are picky. The most troublesome requirement is that clients cannot, "without our express prior written approval, use any Product Advertising Content on or in connection with any site or application designed or intended for use with a mobile phone or other handheld device." That's no good. Goodreads has mobile apps, and those are more convenient for checking in while reading a book than a desktop site is.

The other key restriction is that Goodreads couldn't link to competing bookstores while using Amazon's API. Users will notice that Barnes & Noble is now the most prominently displayed book seller on Goodreads, and Amazon sits in a drop-down menu with a bunch of other sites.

Why Goodreads Will Be Fine

Shelfari may have the benefit of using Amazon book data to its heart's content. But Goodreads has built a thriving social network on top of its book data, and it offers much more to users than the competitors. In addition to original content, like interviews with authors, Goodreads makes for a great Facebook Timeline app, so Facebook users can turn the books they read into life events.

But even within Goodreads itself, there are great book recommendations using true reader sentiments, not just purchase and browsing history like Amazon uses. Goodreads acquired Discovereads last year to build a "taste engine" on top of its users' data.

Goodreads also offers a social reading API of its own, so developers can access social data, reviews and discussions. For Goodreads, the books themselves are just the backend. While Amazon is surely a wealth of book data, Goodreads can repair its library on its own. It will pay license fees to Ingram, the largest U.S. wholesaler of books, and it will fill the gaps from libraries and other open data sources.

This teaches a lesson about building a service on top of another company's data, especially one that might want to compete with you. But for the long term, these growing pains will be well worth it as Goodreads makes its way independently.

Do you use Goodreads or another social reading service?

Lead photo courtesy of Tatiana Popova/Shutterstock.

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[Beta Invites] Spool Lets You View Video, Even When You're Offline

 

 

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[Beta Invites] Spool Lets You View Video, Even When You're Offline

via ReadWriteWeb by Dave Copeland on 1/30/12

Services like Read It Later and Instapaper have developed huge followings from people who want to quickly set aside content for when they have more time, or to access it offline.

Now, along comes Spool, which promises to do much of the same link-saving as Read It Later and Instapaper, with the added perk of being able to do the same with video. We've been playing around with Spool, which remains in invite-only mode, for the past several days and found that it works (mostly) as advertised.

We also have invites available for those of you who want to try Spool out but don't want to wait around for an invite of your own.

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CEO and co-founder Avichal Garg said he and co-founder Curtis Spencer came up with the idea when they noticed there was no guarantee they'd be able to pull up content on their phone, or be able to access the same bits of content across multiple devices.

Garg and Spencer are calling the technology behind the service SpoolBot, which Garg described as an artificial intelligence and computer vision engine. By residing on a server, SpoolBot can essentially translate content on a Web page into a format your device can understand. Garg said it was also good at keeping pace with changes on the sites where content is culled.

"What we wanted for ourselves was a simple way to have our favorite content always available, without worrying about which device I'm on (my Android phone vs. my iPad), where I am (inside, outside, home, work), or what kind of media it is (text, pdf, video)," Garg said in an email. "With one click you can save content from any of your devices, and that content shows up on all of your other devices too, is available offline, and is converted into a format that will work for you. So you don't need to worry about Flash and you don't need to worry about whether your phone has a PDF reader."

The one exception to that assertion that I found after a weekend of accessing a wide range of content in New York City's mostly WiFi-free subway system on my iPhone, iPad and laptop were YouTube videos, which can only be accessed with an Internet connection because of licensing agreements. As an aside, it also seemed as if YouTube videos accessed through Spool had more advertisements than when the same video was accessed straight through YouTubes site, and it was trickier to skip over ads using Spool than it is on YouTube.

I also didn't like that I couldn't tag videos and content or organize it into lists: my only choices were Unread, Read, Favorites and Archived. Garg assured me that adding some sort of organization and classification system was on the firm's to-do list and should be available within the next few weeks.

Saving material on Spool was, for the most part, easy. A Google Chrome extension allowed me to save videos and other content with one click. Setting up the widget on other devices was slightly more time-consuming.

Spool also connects to DropBox, allowing you to save content in a folder on DropBox and then have it automatically saved on your Spool. Users can also push content to Facebook from the Android app, the webapp, and the Chrome browser extension, with plans to add the feature to the Firefox extension and iOS app.

Users cannot, however, push content to Twitter. "We used to let users Tweet out from within the app. We've removed this feature because very few users used it," Garg said. "We're going to soon launch a feature to let users tweet links at us and we'll put those URLs into Spool."

Spool will remain in it's beta, invite-only phase at least until the Spring. ReadWriteWeb readers, however, can try Spool out without waiting for an invite.

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Rawporter Wants To Make Us All (Paid) Broadcast Journalists

 

 

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Rawporter Wants To Make Us All (Paid) Broadcast Journalists

via ReadWriteWeb by Dave Copeland on 1/30/12

A startup is hoping to combine two hot web trends, crowd sourcing and microearning, into a single savior for cash-strapped, broadcast newsrooms.

Rawporter, an iPhone app that will soon be rolled out for Android, turns almost anyone into a local news cameraman or camerawoman. Instead of dispatching a camera crew to a fire during rush hour and risk they won't get there until after the flame is out, a television news reporter can create an assignment from Rawporter's Web interface and send it to anyone with the app who may be in the area of the fire.

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The service already has a semi-endorsement from Janis Krums, the Staten Island ferry passenger who became a celebrated citizen journalist for taking his iconic "Miracle on the Hudson" photo. In a promotional video, Krums says if a service like Rawporter had existed in 2009, he may have gotten fairly compensated for his photo.

Speaking at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York on Saturday, Rawporter co-founder Rob Gaige said the assignment feature allows producers to tell photographers how much they'll be paid. Photo and video journalists retain rights to the work they create using the app and can share it with their followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

"Our job is to make your job easier," Gaige told conference attendees, most of whom were journalists, and many of whom were not buying assertions that Rawporter would not threaten their already tenuous job security.

Even an instructional video on Rawporter's Web site notes that traditional news crews are "too costly and too slow for today's news market" and that viewers don't want to see "a reporter talking about the aftermath" when they can watch an event as it unfolds.

The app itself is relatively straightforward to use.It feels a lot like Instagram, except it also offers push notifications from news outlets looking for content. I've been using it since Saturday and, so far, no assignments have been tossed my way but, then again, as far as I know I have not been in the vicinity of any newsworthy events.

For producers looking to fill a sudden news hole, there's not a lot of user-generated content to choose from just yet (aside from videos shot at the conference where Gaige was speakinbg, the most recent video is from a Jan. 23 vigil following the death of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno).

Rawporter just launched in November, so it may take awhile for accidental journalists to discover the site, and for producers to figure out if they're breaking union contracts by outsourcing camera work for $10 or $25 a clip.

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