No doubt, these three companies will change the social media world in the next year to three years. If you want to be ahead of the curve, check out what they do and why we think they they will be so important below.
1. Diaspora: Diaspora started to a lot of hoopla and continues to generate buzz after some students from NYU raised over $100,000 in less than a month using the Kickstarter funding platform. Diaspora aims to be an ‘open’ alternative to Facebook. Basically, Diaspora wants to put the control over your social network in your hands. The company stresses Choice, Ownership, and Simplicity. Diaspora is for those that think Facebook takes too many liberties with your data and lets you keep ownership of whatever you add to the network. The interface will look more like a WordPress blog editor than a typical social network and will give users near complete control of how they connect with others.
The model Diaspora is pursuing is almost opposite to that of Facebook’s and they believe that as people become increasingly aware of their lack of control on other sites, Diaspora will provide them with a solution. Open is certainly the way of the future in Web 3.0, but Diaspora is very ambitious. Their values will certainly affect the social media world in the near future even if comes in the form of another project.
2. Empire Avenue: Very basically, Empire Avenue is a social stock market made up of you and your friends. The higher your influence in social media, the higher your stock price. You can add your various social networks and social media activities you do will all contribute to your overall influence score. We talked about Pay With A Tweet a while back and this plays on the same idea that individuals and their network have value. You can buy and sell friends or anyone in the virtual stock market. Additionally you are free to choose what kind of advertisements you carry with your profile and the site has a very rewarding revenue sharing set-up.
As social media users continue to become more aware of the power they posses and can build up online, start-ups like Empire Avenue that help them turn that into an actual return will explode.
3. OneTrueFan: This may be the most influential start-up of the three. They have been described as ‘foursquare for web pages’ and they love that description. This takes the idea of check-in and applies it to web page. Like Foursquare, you are awarded points for checking-in and participating with a venue, only with OneTrueFan, the venue is a web page. This has the potential to be a powerful social layer for businesses to use on their site to get more participation from their most active fans. The name comes from the idea that each site will have one true fan, in other words, a mayor. People will compete to the be the number one fan through activities placed on the website and by checking in upon visiting. Look for almost every even semi-social website out there to have a check-in system in place within the next three years at most.
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