Minority Rapport

vSocial Gets Social: Cultivating A Community of Users Generating Content

Early last month, I had the pleasure of meeting with vSocial Chief Technology Officer Brad Webb and vSocial founder and CEO Brent Oesterblad at their headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona.  We met for over an hour talking about vSocial, the competitive landscape of online video today and where it might be going in the future.  This month, Jon and I spoke with Brad.  The bottom line is that vSocial is a cool website: clean design, easy to use and constantly getting new features to enhance sociability amongst users. 

What's interesting to me is looking at websites that are figuring out how to build a community that generates its own content, builds relationships between content/people and ultimately builds lasting value that only increases over time.  For example, vSocial allows tagging of video by all users, not just the user who uploads the video.  (Similarly, Amazon has been testing permitting users to add tags on its product pages).  In the online video space, it still appears to be fairly early in the sense that no one service has established itself as an absolute destination, including Vimeo, YouTube and MySpace Video.  Of course YouTube has the traffic lead now, but given the potential for user-generated content's growth in video online, YouTube is far from a household name.  The big question is will someone in the space or a new entrant develop an innovation that creates such as edge that competitors lose users in droves. 

One thing is clear: vSocial definitely wants to be that company to create the innovations that will attract a wide audience.  Brad summarized this space well: "Innovate or die."   We look forward to tracking their development as they continue to enhance vSocial.

Some interesting statistics about vSocial from Brad:
* 7,000 videos uploaded
* 7,000 registered users
* Website traffic has doubled in the last month
* 8 out of 10 users sign up only to comment
* 40% of users are female
* 70% of users are not familar with tagging systems
* 50% of the innovation is driven by user feedback

We had some technical difficulties with the podcast.  We will post it as an update when it is ready.

Aggregating & Making Sense of Product Reviews in Blogs

A few days ago Jon and I had the opportunity to speak with Vaibhav Domkundwar, the founder of iNods, a search engine for product reviews aimed at the consumer "pain points" related to finding information about products.  I am interested in iNods and other vertical search engines in the product research space because it is interesting to see how each tries to make sense of the extensive product review information scattered around the internet.  The challenge is identifying and separating the quality content from the spam, which is something iNods takes very seriously.  The iNods approach is to limit the size of the index and incorporate manual identification of quality reviews. The idea is that at the very least the aggregated reviews will be more useful than the reviews provided through Amazon or epinions.  Vaibhav has thoughts about all of these issues and it sounds like we will be seeing a stream of enhancements to iNods through the rest of the year. For example, I look forward to seeing how iNods will help enable bloggers and contributors of reviews online to monetize their content.  Certainly if bloggers start creating more content to be indexed by a vertical engine, other search engines can also index that material.  I am interested in seeing how product review engines will try to contain this value for themselves.

I am interested to see how iNods and other vertical engines in this space deal with the issues of trust and identity.  It is definitely way too early to pick likely winners in this space, which is really separate  from the comparison shopping engine space because there are no product prices listed in results.  One thing is clear: there are many potential avenues for innovation, and it will be fun to see how different engines approach the problem.  We look forward to keeping tabs on iNods as well as other vertical search engines as they innovate and seek to develop sustainable competitive edges. 

On the call we discussed iNods and other developments in the product search space.  You can get the podcast by clicking here (MP3, 8.33MB).  Thank you to Vaibhav for joining us on the call.