What do Color, Quora, Hunch, Blippy, and StockTwits have in common? They are examples of companies that generate value for their users by leveraging the concept of the Interest Graph. The list also features some of the most promising startups right now, having raised close to $100 million in venture funding. Pure coincidence?
Yesterday, at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, Googler and PayPal founder Max Levchin and Benchmark GP Bill Gurley discussed “game-changing technology” and the future of the Web. Emblematic of today’s mindset, they attacked this rather large topic by comparing the strengths and objectives of Google and Facebook, using the latter’s jaw-dropping stats (500+ million users, 1 in every 13 people on Earth logs into Facebook each day) and its promotion of the social graph as a measure of what’s to come.
With the massive supremacy of Facebook in the social networking space, it's easy to assume that the door is closed for social network innovation. The reality, however, is that we've barely begun to scratch the surface of how we interact with and derive value and pleasure from our networks. There is good reason to think that even the way we think about who is in our social networks is going to undergo massive change, driven in part by our new access to strangers with common interests.
18 months ago, social commerce was no more than a twinkle in the eyes of many businesses, and whilst many still have yet to add a social layer to how they sell in order to improve customer experience, the Zeitgeist-surfing digirati are already asking what comes next. Om Malik is the founder of the influential GigaOM Network and thinks that the "Interest Graph" is what comes next after social commerce…
In July 2010, Chris Dixon - co-founder of Hunch - noted we would soon enter a phase where "one graph to rule them all" will give way to more-focused, social graphs built around concepts such as taste, location and trust. In other words, these concepts could become the underpinning of what is now generically known as the interest graph.
Badgeville, the leading Social Loyalty Platform, gives content, commerce and community brands the power to drive and measure user behavior with social and game mechanics. Badgeville's industry-leading customers experience increases in key business objectives 30 percent or more.
This concept of an Interest Graph was first introduced by a company called Epinions which implemented the first one in 1999. But, what exactly is the Interest Graph? It is a representation of the relationship between people and their interests.
In order for social networks to truly reshape our experience of the rest of the Web, developers must first understand the relationship between our social graphs and our interest graphs.
Social media is maturing as are the people embracing its most engaging tools and networks. Perhaps most notably, is the maturation of relationships and how we are expanding our horizons when it comes to connecting to one another. What started as the social graph, the network of people we knew and connected to in social networks, is now spawning new branches that resemble how we interact in real life.
Facebook has acquired friend.ly, developers of a Facebook-integrated website that lets users get to know their friend better by asking them questions about their interests. The friend.ly website will continue to operate, but the team will be “focusing on new projects at Facebook” according to an announcement on friend.ly’s blog.
To help us always find and store our valuable social content, a recently founded startup called Pinevio came up with a web product that is built on a concept of the interest graphs as part of their platform. The term interest graph is best described by Brian Solis, globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis calls this phenomenon – a “silhouette” of our interactions with content on social web, that outlines our interests, concerns, views, and potential, which ultimately can be translated into offline actions.
Pinevio is a social content discovery platform, enabling users to discover great content from people with shared interests
EBay said it will use Hunch's "taste graph" technology to provide its users with non-obvious recommendations for items based on their unique tastes. The company said it will also apply Hunch's technology to other areas such as search, advertising and marketing, in order to better surface product information based on its customers' tastes.
Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month.
Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?
33Across, a social data analytics company that has cultivated a humongous database to help marketers target online advertising at their so-called “brand graph,” has acquired TYNT, an analytics firm claiming to be the biggest supplier of “interest graph” data helping publishers understand when, where and how users copy, paste and share their online content. The combined company claims to be the biggest supplier of social graph data for marketers, agencies and publishers in the world, surpassing even Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
Amazon and Apple are massively successful retailers, the envy of digital and brick-and-mortar businesses alike. Currently, the two tech retailers enjoy a place among the biggest, most successful companies in the world. But they have a blind spot. The premises on which they've built their market advantage are now no longer the most important things in digital. They're missing a data asset that would allow them to understand their customers better: the interest graph.
Much is being made in current social media circles of the “interest graph” concept, which is more about what you know than who you know, and which purportedly has strong connections to purchase intent and other matters of concern to online marketers.
Put differently, while social networks like Facebook focus on what you have in common with your friends and how you react to friends’ recommendations, interest graph-based models (like the ones behind Pinterest, GetGlue or Foodspotting) make social connections based on shared interests, not the other way around.
Pearltrees, a company offering a novel interface for sharing and finding content, has raised 5 million euros ($6.7 million US) in new funding.
The basic unit of the Pearltrees service is the pearl, which is basically a bookmark. Users can assemble these pearls into trees based around a topic. Meanwhile, Pearltrees is using that data to determine how different topics and bookmarks are related, and allows users to find new pearls (related to whatever topic they’re exploring) through its “related interests” button.