Website lets you shop and socialize
Shared bookmarks are the key
You can't buy friendship. But Philip Jacob of Watertown thinks you can shop for it.
That's why Jacob started StyleFeeder, a new website that lets people create a new kind of online community, by bookmarking items from their favorite online shopping sites.
Jacob and others are hoping to repeat the success of social networking websites like MySpace by launching a social bookmarking site. At these sites, users sign up free of charge. Then they post links to their favorite sites, and share those links with friends, family members, or total strangers with similar tastes.
The concept was born in 2003, when engineer Joshua Schachter wanted a way to get his own Internet bookmarks from any connected computer in the world. He created del.icio.us, a website that displayed all of his favorite sites.
As a lark, he designed the system so that others could use his bookmarks, and post their own. Soon, thousands of people were using the service, and venture investors were calling with offers of cash. Late last year, the giant Internet company Yahoo Inc. purchased del.icio.us, and plans to use it as the core of a new online community.
Industry veterans and savvy venture capitalists think there's still room in the social bookmarking business. They're pouring millions into a host of these new online communities, and hoping to attract large audiences that can translate into millions in advertising dollars.
Jacob got the idea for StyleFeeder from watching his wife shop online. She and a friend in Cambridge kept exchanging links to items that appealed to them. ``They have such similar preferences," Jacob said. ``They love to share the things they see."
But the two friends found it difficult to keep track of the bargains they'd spotted. ``They can't find what they sent to each other three months ago," said Jacob, who works as a data security consultant.
For a year, Jacob spent his free time cobbling together a solution to his wife's problem. People who sign up for a free StyleFeeder membership can add a link to their browser toolbars. While shopping for, say, shoes, a user can click the link, and then the image of an attractive pair of pumps. A copy of that image is added to the user's StyleFeeder page, with a link to the online store selling the shoes. The user can also type in ``tags," a set of keywords related to the shoes. Other StyleFeeder users, searching for similar shoes, can use a tag search to find them. And they can contact each other to share shopping tips, and perhaps form friendships.
``I knew it was a good idea," said Jacob. ``Everybody I described it to said, wow, that's really cool." One of StyleFeeder's big fans was Halley Suitt, cofounder of Top Ten Media Inc., a Cambridge company whose TopTenSources.com site helps readers find high-quality information published on blogs. ``It does a few things wonderfully well," said Suitt. ``It's really fun."
Suitt liked it so much, she bought the company for an undisclosed sum. Jacob will stay on as Top Ten's vice president of technology. With financial backing from RSS Partners, an Internet venture capital firm in Cambridge, Jacob and Suitt hope to build StyleFeeder into a major force in social networking.
But Sucharita Mulpuru, senior analyst at Forrester Research in New York, has her doubts about whether online shoppers are eager to socialize. ``I think it remains to be seen whether or not consumers will come to these places as destinations to find things," Mulpuru said. She said it might make sense for an established online merchant to offer the StyleFeeder service as an attractive option to its existing customers.
That idea has occurred to Jacob and Suitt as well. It's on their list of ways to make money from StyleFeeder. They're also looking to sell ads on the site, and considering a sponsored link program, in which merchants would pay StyleFeeder a percentage whenever someone orders merchandise through the site. ``There are numerous possibilities," said Jacob, but for now he said he's focused on further improvements to the site, and on building up a user community large enough to ensure StyleFeeder has a future.
They'll have to fend off a host of rivals. In Boston, Gather.com has signed up 50,000 members who share bookmarks and discussions on everything from politics to fine dining. Founder Tom Gerace said that Gather aims for a different audience than other social sites. ``Most of the sites out there today focus on the very young set, the 15- to 25-year-olds," Gerace said. The median age of Gather's users is 44, with 73 percent of them having an undergraduate degree or better.
Two other sites, Blue Dot and Searchles, hope to use bookmarks to create a better kind of Internet search service. These sites will generate an index of the pages bookmarked by users. Because the pages were picked by humans, the resulting index could produce more useful and relevant search results than those provided by current search technology.
Chris Seline, chief executive of Dumbfind Inc., parent company of Searchles, said that Yahoo will probably use del.icio.us and its vast database of links for the same purpose. Combined with Yahoo's ample supply of cash, this would seem to give the huge online company an overwhelming advantage. But Seline isn't worried. ``I think we can move faster," he said. ``We can add a lot of cool features that it will take Yahoo too long to implement."
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
Room to grow
Investors think there is still room in the social bookmarking business for new websites. Here are a few such sites and information about their backers:
del.icio.us
Launched in 2003
Funding: by Union Square Ventures, Amazon.com, and Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen; amount not published
Acquired in 2005 by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount
The pitch:The first and most basic social bookmarking site, del.icio.us has few bells and whistles. Users post their favorite links, adding keywords called ``tags" to help users identify specific topics.
gather.com
Launched in November
Funding: $6 million in January from venture investors including former Lotus chief executive Jim Manzi, Allen & Co., and Southern California Public Radio
The pitch: Social bookmarking for the NPR set. Lots of discussions of politics, business, and the arts
stylefeeder.com
Launched in June
Funding: $40 from founder Philip Jacob; an investment from RSS Investors; amount not published
The pitch: For Web surfers who wear Prada. StyleFeeder targets avid shoppers, encouraging them to publish their latest bargains and hook up with shoppers of similar tastes.
bluedot.us
Launched in June
Funding: $1.5 million from angel investors that include former Microsoft senior vice president Richard Fade and former Starbucks senior vice president Don Valencia
The pitch: Blue Dot thinks your friends know more than Google. The site aims to turn shared bookmarks into an alternative Internet search service.
searchles.com
Launched in June
Funding: $500,000 from an anonymous angel investor
The pitch: Similar to Blue Dot. The service builds up a search engine based on sites bookmarked by users. 