Foursquare Co-founder Naveen Selvadurai Checks Out

Three years after launching Foursquare in New York City, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai announced that he is leaving the company.
During his tenure, the Foursquare community grew from roughly one hundred Beta testers to 15 million people using the check-in service and 750,000 businesses on the merchant platform.  The site has logged more than 1.5 billion check-ins to date.
With over 100 employees, the growing company has moved its headquarters to a bigger office in SoHo and added a satellite office in San Francisco.
GigaOm writer Om Malik was suspicious when when Spark Capital, one of Foursquare’s investors, bought $50 million worth of employee stock last month. Today, Selvadurai confirmed in a blog post that he would be leaving the company at the end of the month.
“After three years, I feel I’ve done all I can do and I’m moving on,” wrote Selvadurai. “[Co-founder Dennis Crowley] and I have been discussing timing for a while, and we decided that now, on this anniversary, it feels right to begin the transition.”
Selvadurai will oversee the release of a few “final projects” before he leaves, and will remain on the board of advisers as the rest of the company moves forward.
“But spring is time for things that are new,” Selvadurai continued, “and I realize that I have a desire to do something new as well. I’m not sure about my exact next steps, but I’ll probably get back to what I love most – being an entrepreneur, learning and building new things.”

15:03 by Robert dawne · 0

“Halal Facebook” Set to Help Muslims Get Social

A new social network called Salamworld is set to launch during the month of Ramadan (between July and August) and plans to serve Muslims as a place to get to know one another and socialize.  Chairman Abdulvahit Hiyazov emphasizes that the project is a business project and has no agenda related to political movements.
If you check out the Salamworld site, you can see that what the site is trying to do is give Islamic web users a social home and a place for various communities to connect.  The Salamworld team has clearly been working hard to establish strong ties with various Islamic communities around the world, as evidenced by their current edition of the newsletter.  Whether this will translate into government-backed promotion of the network is yet to be seen, as there are currently parts of the Islamic world such as Iran that are brutally fighting against social media, attempting to ban users from using it.
Unfortunately, the Salamworld project is still behind the curtain.  There aren’t any sneak peeks or screenshots at this point, despite the fact the project is launching in a few months.  So will this social network be the next big international social media trend?  Salamworld thinks so: they are hoping to achieve 50 million users within the next 3 years.  The company chairman estimates that there are 300 million Muslim users on Facebook alone.  Whether those users will flock to Salamworld will largely depend on the quality of the user experience.  We’ll keep you in the loop.

14:52 by Robert dawne · 0

Beyond Facebook: The Rise Of Interest-Based Social Networks

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.

14:43 by Robert dawne · 0

MSN Launches msnNOW Social Trends App on Facebook, Web and Mobile

One of the Web’s oldest portals, MSN, is about to dive headfirst into one of the Internet’s hottest trends: Social Media.
No, Microsoft, which runs MSN, is not launching its own social network. Instead, the 17-year-old content destination is unveiling a new social reader, msnNOW, on Facebook, the Web and in a new web-based mobile interface.
The initiative is actually two components. According to MSN General Manager Bob Visse, a team of 20 editors will use a new Demand Dashboard to measure velocity and volume of trending topics across Facebook, Twitter, the Bing search engine and BreakingNews.com (a joint MSN/NBC venture).
Stories that are trending will appear on msnNOW in a constantly updating “Biggest Movers” box. In addition, a team of editors will select topics and stories from among those social (and search) trends and create 100 word write-ups for posts that will appear in msnNOW’s What’s Trending homepage.
The page, which will look pretty much the same on the web and in the new Facebook app, will feature a large main story and a grid of other popular stories below. Visse described it as a “river of real-time content”. Within each area, reader will find small icons for Twitter, Facebook and BreakingNews.com. The presence of each will indicate on which social networks the stories and topics are trending.
These are not icons for sharing these posts, but Visse promised that sharing options would be obvious on the Web site and in the Facebook app, where there will be opportunities to share and comment.
Along with each MSN-created post, readers will find related Bing search terms, Tweets and other content. Not every topic or story will get an MSN write-up. For those, What’s Trending will link to a Bing result, which will also offer a link directly to the original content source. “We give the best of the web regardless of where that content or hot story originated from,” Visse told us.
Visse explained that MSN is targeting a younger “always socially connected consumer who lives an online lifestyle for information gathering and seeking.” That may mean that some of the trending content will be a little edgier than what you traditionally see on the portal. It’s all designed to start a conversation. Even the design has the younger demo in mind. It’s image-centric, with what Visse calls “short, pithy headlines.”
It’s also one of the first times that MSN has launched a new product across three separate platforms at once and, as Visse noted, it’s the first time MSN “has done anything interesting with the Facebook social reader experience.” msnNOW, however, will not launch with Google+ integration, though Visse said Microsoft is open to tracking volume and acceleration on the still young social network at a future date.
Visse calls the msnNOW project a “transformative experience for MSN.” Even so, the design is still decidedly MSN-centric across all platforms. Visse contends that while msnNOW is not yet a Metro design (the cubist-look Microsoft is painting across virtually all of its interfaces), msnNOW’s “component-like design is not a big leap to get a Metro-like design.”
The intention with the current look is for a really good, super-easy-to-use interface. The mobile interface, in particular, is designed for easy touch and swipe consumption across multiple mobile devices (the mobile web site should work well on the latest iOS, Windows Phone and Android browsers).
Though MSN currently enjoys a reported 125 million monthly visitors, with 75 million visiting the MSN portal homepage each month, msnNOW will not take over that hot destination. Visse told that msnNOW will have a hard and visible link from the MSN homepage and msnNOW content that does make the main homepage will feature msnNOW artwork and insignias.
msnNOW is an interesting bet for Microsoft, the big software company without its own big social network. Can it be the aggregator instead of the creator? And will content and media companies like the 100-word write-ups — or will they think such stories are cannibalizing their content?
Visse, though, has other concerns. “I’m waiting to see how it works out. Did we connect with the younger demo in the way I think we’re going to? Are the edit choices and the way we package them together interesting and exciting for users?” All good questions and Visse acknowledges that he won’t know the answers until they launch the product.

13:27 by Robert dawne · 0