TC50: Popego Tailors the Social Graph to Your Interests

Popego helps people find more meaning in their social graphs online. The Argentinean startup presented today during the Collaboration session of TechCrunch50 and has just launched its service into public beta. You can watch the video of Popego’s presentation here.

Once signed up for Popego, you can add usernames from all of your social networks (passwords are not required). The service then brings you to a page where all of your interests are shown as tags, which have been pulled and generated from your activity on services like Twitter, Delicious, and FriendFeed.

Then, based on those interests, Popego populates your page with content – such as Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and stories posted to FriendFeed – that it believes you will like.

If you don’t agree with the interests generated by Popego based on your accounts elsewhere, you can change your interest profile with slider equalizers that tell Popego what you’d like in your timeline of content.

Each bookmark, story, video, or photo added to your timeline also includes a percentage interest match based on the relevancy of your interests. A higher percentage means you’re more likely to like the element.

In the right-hand side of the site, you can filter the interest feed even further by indicating that you want to see only videos, stuff from friends, etc.

For each piece of content in the timeline, you can click on the contributor’s username and it will display a popup card with information about them. The popup can be used to get an idea about the person and see what that person is reading and doing online. The popup also works as a widget that can be embedded on your blog or elsewhere.

More features are in the pipe, among them a set of charts and widgets. So-called “autoblogs” also let you see more about people on Popego and their interests.

Expert Panel

Kevin Rose:

“I think a lot of this is really interesting. One of the things we struggle with is to get the most relevant data to people. When I look at Friendfeed and Socialthing, I wonder if this is something that will break out and have massive adoption or is this just Silicon Valley, Web 2.0. I like what you’re doing and I think it’s very unproven.”

Founder Santiago Sir:

“What we envision is that there is a new dimension of interests that emerges over the social graph, you can call it the interest graph.”

Founder Emiliano Kargieman:

“The Web is becoming more noisy, it is very hard to keep up, so in some way the only way to explore the Web in the future is if the Web knows us and tries to filter it.”

Roelof Botha:

“Presentation was well done and it’s quick to see how you can get benefit from your service and the design and interface is well done. I like that you’re trying to solve the overload problem, but I worry about distribution and I don’t know how I would see it gaining mass adoption. I’m also suspect about the business model.”

Mark Cuban:

“You’re becoming part of a class of network management tools. The more traffic you have, the more latency you have, the more you want to create efficiency. What you’re going to need is something that really stands out and makes people go “wow.” You’ll all grab what the other people are doing and need to preempt something else that others can’t do. Or they can do something that’s just cool. But if you can come up with something in terms of interface, you’ve got all kinds of stuff you can do. You have to find something sexy.”