If you weren’t creeped out by data-mining startup Rapleaf after reading about their ways in a relatively unsettling Wall Street Journal article published last October (“The San Francisco startup says it has 1 billion e-mail addresses in its database”), chances are you will be now.
For its latest ‘study’, Rapleaf has tapped its database of identifiable information to extract a sample of 6,000 Google employees (email addresses ending in @google.com) and 16,000 Microsoft employees (email addresses ending in @microsoft.com) and subsequently analyzed their grocery purchase behavior in partnership with an unnamed loyalty cards aggregator. → Read More
Editor’s Note: The following guest post is written by a Silicon Valley CEO. Frank Dupree is a pen name
In the late 1990s, the rise of the browser was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented opportunity for startups. A great part of that increased opportunity came as a result of the significant reduction in platform dependencies. No longer did the users’ operating system dictate their access to services or information. Even a behemoth like Microsoft was fighting hand-to-hand combat with small startups for the first time in decades. Fast forward ten years, and it’s 1985 all over again.
But even as the risks of dependencies become better understood by startups and investors, the ascent of Facebook and Twitter seem to point to an ever increasing number of startups with significant business dependencies. Recent changes to both Facebook and Twitter show that neither startups nor their investors can assume much when it comes to support for a given API in the future. Today, even the OS seems subject to dramatic shifts in record time. One only need look to Apple’s iOS to see how dramatic and unpredictable developments can change the landscape for startups, customers and investors.
Today, most startups build with significant external platform dependencies, whether it is Facebook, iOS, Google Apps or Twitter. There are a few types of dependencies. A simple distinction might be to call a dependency on a platform symbiotic or parasitic. Symbiotic dependencies are those for which both sides agree to terms of the dependency and for which both sides seem to derive a benefit. Developers on Facebook’s platform, for example. The most successful here being Zynga, which grew completely and—probably for the team and its investors—nervously within the Facebook ecosystem. → Read More
Twitter keeps on growing like a weed, and there seems to be no stopping the much-hyped, heavily scrutinized Silicon Valley startup in its quest to turn its popular micro-sharing service into a veritable pulse of the planet. Twitter passed 50 million unique visitors worldwide in July, according to comScore, reaching 51.6 million UVs at the end of the month. But its biggest increase in traffic Twitter saw earlier this year, when unique visitors numbers gradually increased to reach 44.5 million in June, up from 19.1 million in the beginning of March.
While the service’s growth understandably lifts the follower numbers of the average Twitter user along the way, a Raplead study shows there’s also an apparent popularity gap that continues to widen. → Read More
Vivek, over at Startup Squad, recently discovered a new social network and social networking meta search engine, Streakr. The main URL still says the site is coming soon. The new engine lets you search the profiles on the major networks (MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook) as well at it’s own social network. It appears to be a hook to draw people into their main service, like Wink did when they launched their own profile search and Rapleaf had with UpScoop. Profile management tool ProfileLinker also has a search engine. Streakr’s social network is like Delicious for cool kids and is a less flashy take on Trig. It includes a profiles, a toolbar, and a stumble upon feature that lets you flip through links in a given category. Here’s the one for video. The profiles look a lot like MySpace, consisting of the usual details, about me, photos, and seizure inducing layouts. Xenia is Streakrs’ Tom. However, where MySpace puts a blog and comments, Streakr puts in favorite links and your “thumbs up” rating for each. You can input the links into your profile manually, or use the Streakr toolbar to add links to your profile and vote on them. The toolbar also provides an interface to all the other functionality on the main site, and is currently only for IE, requires the .NET framework, and takes forever and a day to download and install. There are a couple other sites with social networking meta search. Here’s the lowdown on a few: Wink Wink is fast and simple. It searches Friendster, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Live Spaces. It also has advanced search features, like location, sex, status, age, and interests. It also lets you narrow your search by those fields after your first search. ProfileLinker ProfileLinker is the most comprehensive search engine, with 84 social networking sites including general, blog, cultural, dating, professional, student, and special interest networks. Unfortunately you have to log in to use it. UpScoop UpScoop comes ahead in ease of use. Unlike the others, UpScoop searches by email based on all the contacts in your address book. It searches Bebo, Classmates, Ecademy, Flickr, Friendster, Hi5, Livejournal, Multiply, MySpace, Ringo, Tickle, Tribe, Yelp, Mog, and LinkedIn. While it finds the vast majority of your friends off the bat, some drawbacks are that it can take UpScoop up to a couple hours to search for the last few and → Read More
Online reputation online is a fascinating area, partially because eBay, through their feedback score, is the only company to have reached scale. Startups like Rapleaf and iKarma are still young and struggling. Perhaps their flaw has been in taking the high road, and going out of their way to ensure that reputational feedback is being left by verified identities. New startup Gorb, which I first read about on David Berlind’s blog, takes no such high road. Gorb allows, even insists on, anonymous comments and ratings about an individual. Like someone? Hate them? Tell Gorb all about it, using their handy Ajax slider to rate them from 1 – 10 in their professional and personal lives, and leave written comments as well. Arguing that a “non-anonymous system also contains “noise,” as reciprocity creates a fake positive response,” Gorb founder Leonard Boord (trash or glorify him here) thinks that anonymous feedback is the only way to go. They do have some checks on the wholesale slaughter of people’s reputations. Each written comment can be voted, Digg style, up or down by other users. If lots of people agree with you, your reputation is enhanced. If they disagree, your reputation suffers. The person being discussed may also respond to each comment. I agree with Boord that services like LinkedIn are often a farce – people leave good feedback on others in the hope that the gesture will be returned. And since the user must approve feedback before it is published to the site, only gushing testaments to perfection ever see the light of day. Rapleaf does a much better job than LinkedIn at getting balanced feedback from users. But there is still a cost to posting something negative – Rapleaf isn’t an anonymous service, and comments are at least tied to a user name. With Gorb, there’s absolutely nothing to lose by telling someone how bad they smell, or how much you dislike the tone of their voice. Libel away. I think Gorb goes too far, and will appeal mostly to people who have highly negative things to say about others. Without fear of being held accountable for their words, people may go a little overboard in their quest to “help” people know the truth about themselves. But Gorb also has the smell of success about it. People will be drawn to this in the same way they slow down when they pass → Read More
Today, the reputation network Rapleaf is releasing a new service called Upscoop, which joins a number of startups (see ProfileLinker and Wink, for example) trying to add a meta layer above social networks. There are a lot of these networks, and a lot of people belong to more than one. Keeping track of your own networks, and those of your friends, is complicated. Upscoop is designed to help you figure out which networks your friends belong to, based on their email address. You give Upscoop your email credentials (including the password) for your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email account. Upscoop grabs your contact list, and then searches across a number of social networks and tries to find profile pages of people that you know among the 10 million profiles they’ve indexed across the major social networks. The process of searching is not instantaneous – it actually takes a few hours. Clicking on any result will (sometimes) bring you to the profile page for that person. You can then add them as a friend or otherwise interact with them. Asking people to give Upscoop their full email credentials to complete the search is going to be a tough sell. But this is a lot easier than searching for friends one-by-one on Wink. For people serious about connecting with friends, Upscoop may be for them. → Read More
Rapleaf is a new feedback and reputation startup that aims to be the open version of eBay feedback. For more information, see my initial profile and launch post. Rapleaf is a product that I strongly endorse and believe in (and I asked for something like this last year in this post). In what I see as a good sign for Rapleaf, eBay appears to be selectively removing listings from sellers who point to their Rapleaf reputation profiles: From: auended@ebay.com Date: May 16, 2006 5:53 AM Subject: eBay Listing Removed: Inappropriate Links (=LS &12362 JM10590049) To: [redacted]@gmail.com Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 14:54:23 PDT Dear [redacted], We appreciate that you chose eBay to list the following listing(s): [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] However, your listing was in violation of eBay’s Inappropriate Links policy and has been removed from eBay. We have credited all associated fees to your account and notified eBay users associated with the transaction that it has been cancelled. We would like to take this opportunity to let you know what part of your listing is not permitted. Your listing(s) contains the following information: http://www.rapleaf.com/profile/view/[redacted] http://www.rapleaf.com/profile/view/[redacted] http://www.rapleaf.com/profile/view/[redacted] eBay does have complicated rules for what type of outside links may be included within a post (see policies here). However, these rules are rarely enforced and there are countless examples of policy breaches that do not result in a listing being terminated. For example, see this listing for the sale of search engine DigForIt, which contains numerous third party links and which also clearly violates eBay’s linking policy. In this case, it seems clear that eBay does not want Rapleaf’s new reputation system encroaching on their territory. And by banning links to Rapleaf, they may have just given them the marketing push that the new startup needed. → Read More
Rapleaf’s open feedback system (more about it here) went live late Saturday night, and already has hundreds of users who’ve left thousands of feedback posts on others. CEO Auren Hoffman promises the APIs for the core Rapleaf functions sometime this week, so expect to see Rapleaf mashups very soon. Users can pull their “reputation box” via a code snippet and post it on a website. Mine is below. My TechCrunch reputation score on Rapleaf is here. As I said before, I believe Rapleaf is going to be a winner if they can close the right business development deals. → Read More
eBay’s feedback system is, arguably, their most valuable asset. It provides the grease necessary to make complete strangers comfortable enough to buy and sell from each other. But it’s a closed system – only eBay transactions can affect a user’s feedback score. And as much as eBay doesn’t like it, these users (and more) buy and sell stuff through services other than eBay all the time, online and offline. There is tremendous demand for third party services to incorporate eBay’s feedback system into their applications to make them more usable. But don’t expect to see eBay embrace mashups any time soon, or ever. Last year I asked for an open version of eBay’s feedback system to be created (see no. 3 here). I also suggested that iKarma, who’s in this space, make changes to their product to address this larger market. But until now, no one came at this problem head-on. Enter Rapleaf, a new San Francisco-based service created by Auren Hoffman and Manish Shah that is a fully open version of eBay’s feedback system. It’s in private beta, but will be launching to the public on May 7, 2006. Rapleaf will allow anyone to leave feedback for anyone they’ve transacted with. Others can use this feedback to help them determine if they are doing business with someone who’d likely to engage in fraud. Rapleaf is eBay feedback for the rest of the web, and the offline world. There are three important things to understand about Rapleaf – the interface and basic feature set, fraud prevention and detection, and their API set and related policies. Interface and Features Rapleaf allows any user to leave feedback for anyone (whether they are a user or not), based on a unique email address or phone number. Type that identifier into the search bar. If no results occur, you can be the first to leave feedback for that person. This can be someone you’ve bought or sold with, or just a friend that you want to endorse. Like eBay, a free-text area is included for comments in addition to a positive/neutral/negative rating. A person’s feedback rating is a raw score, with a point added for a positive review and a point subtracted for a negative review (just like eBay). Non-transaction endorsements are calculated and shown separately. Various stats are calculated and displayed based on feedback ratings by others (see screen shot below). Fraud Prevention → Read More
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