[FRANCE/US] Stribe is a plug and play service to instantly create a social network on any website — not unlike competitors Ning, socialthing and meebo. It was founded in March 2008 by Kamel Zeroual, Gaël Delalleau and Demba Diallo, who launched Stribe at TechCrunch50 in September this year.
Watch Stribe’s pitch at 00:17:40
The B2B offer is simple — site administrators can copy and paste a bit of javascript, and hey presto, they have a customizable, freely branded social network for their sites accessed via a small footprint toolbar that pops up at the bottom of the screen. The differentiation happens on the Stribe network service, which allows a site’s community to interact with other communities on all Stribe-enabled sites.
Stribe’s business model is based on selling premium modules including analytics such as the Stribe Back-Office, which provides all key metrics on the site’s community including social metrics, breakdown of users and their engagement times, comment analytics, metrics on ‘hidden activity’ including private chats and messages, and the community’s overall activity.
Moving forward, the company plans to open its API for website developers and provide more premium modules. At their Le Web startup pitch, founders Kamel and Gaël demonstrated how Stribe integrates with Facebook using Facebook Connect using a white labelled version of the service as used by Toys “R” Us.
The company describes itself as a new, multidimensional social layer interface which brings together local communities in a globally shared environment.
In the big picture, the site founders see Stribe as a tool to create new behaviours and participative interactions, with the potential to reap revenue from, for example, precisely engineered advertising campaigns launched across several websites at the same time.