It’s not an entirely new idea: offer a way to view trending content shared by your friends via social media. That’s the basic premise of Utopic, the latest project from the team behind Talentag, the “social CV” that we profiled last August.
In its first iteration, Utopic is entirely reliant on Facebook – support for Twitter and YouTube is forthcoming – and after logging in with Facebook Connect provides a nice visual take on the most popular links, videos, music, movies and events shared and liked by your friends. Its competitors include sites such as Postpost and Summify, which does something similar but via email, and to a lesser degree services like Flipboard.
The idea behind Utopic is to offer a “personalized real-time view of what’s trending today among people who matter to you the most”, says Jüri Kaljundi, Co-founder and CEO of Talentag. Just over a year ago, he wrote a blog post that defined “automatically collected” recommendations and lists from friends as an existing problem that needs to be solved. And it seems that with Utopic he and his team are in-part setting out to do that.
Admittedly, he says that the product is still very much a work-in-progress but that the app already supports multiple browsers, including a nice version optimized for the iPhone and iPad. One of the things they’re focusing on is to keep the site very visual, making the most of that rich content (photos and video) that friends are sharing and essentially (as Utopic stands today) bringing a user’s Facebook stream to life. Content can also be browsed by category.
In terms of potential revenue streams, Kaljundi says the thinking is part targeted advertising, part affiliate fees related to some content types like movies, music and books. The company also has a number of other ideas around monetization but isn’t saying what those are right now.