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Disqus Picks Up A Half-Million Dollars From Fred Wilson And Angels

Mar 18, 2008 General

The blog commenting system Disqus picked up $500,000 in a series A by Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson), Naval Ravikant, Howard Lindzon, Aydin Senkut. Union Square’s investment isn’t all too surprising considering how Fred Wilson has raved about the service. Including Wilson’s own blog, Disqus is currently used on over 4,000 blogs with nearly 60,000 commenters.

The service brings enhancements to blog comments that are not standard features in most blog installations, such as threading, spam filtering, comment/user ratings, and user identities. They’ve also integrated OpenID support through ClickPass. Disqus launched with a host of other commenting services around October of last year. IntenseDebate is a close competitor from a competing incubator, TechStars, as well. SezWho, and CoComment also provide some of the same support.

The overall trajectory of the Disqus and other commenting systems is toward building communities around blogs, similar to MyBlogLog (sold to Yahoo). The idea is to serve as an aggregation point for conversations across multiple blogs so avid commenters can more easily track what’s being talked about. They also want incorporate other feeds such as Facebook and Twitter into user’s profiles. While larger blogs might not like the idea of providing content for another destination site, co-founder Daniel Ha says that the service has already taken hold in verticals such as politics and finance.

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Fixya Raises $6 Million B Round for Crowdsourced Tech-Support

Mar 18, 2008 General

Companies hate providing good tech support for their products because it is expensive. And consumers hate calling up tech support when they can’t get a gadget to work properly because they usually get the run-around. The idea for Fixya is quite simple: Let consumers help fix each other’s gadgets.

The startup, which was in the DemoPit at TechCrunch40, announced a $6 million B round from existing investors Mayfield and Pitango. (It had previously raised $2 million in January, 2007). Fixya already has information on 800,000 consumer products, ranging from electronics to appliances. It also stores a lot of owners manuals in digital form. The site has been growing at a respectable clip. In the U.S., comScore measured 1.5 million unique visitors in February, up 107 percent from the year before (see chart below). Worldwide, comScore estimates 3.7 million unique visitors in January (the company claims 6 million uniques).

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Facebook To Launch New Privacy Controls; Confirms Chat Is Coming

Mar 18, 2008 General

Facebook announced new privacy controls at a press event at their downtown Palo Alto headquarters today, and also demoed their new chat application – called Facebook Chat – that has been rumored since last week. Our real time notes and pictures from the event are here.

New Privacy Controls

The new privacy controls, which will launch on Wednesday morning, allow users to do more with Friend Lists. Users can now set specific privacy controls for different friend groups, said Naomi Gleit, a Facebook product manager. Users can create a friend grouping for co-workers, for example, and share different profile information, updates and other information such as photo albums with that group. Users can put friends into multiple groups.

VP Product Matt Cohler said the new controls are needed. Four years ago, he said, Facebook was perfect for students at private college networks. Today, though, Facebook has 67 million active users, and 2/3 of them live outside the U.S. The privacy controls needed by this wider group are different, he said.

Late last year Facebook started allowing users to group friends, but there was little customization that could be done after the grouping. That effectively made it a useless feature. Now, users have tools that they can use to make those distinctions meaningful.

When users now add information to Facebook, they can choose among seven whitelist settings: everyone on Facebook, friends of friends, all friends, some friends, only me, and certain networks. They can also choose to blacklist certain people and friend lists from seeing the content.

There will now be a ubiquitous blue lock icon around the site that will indicate when privacy settings can be used to control who sees a particular piece of information.

Facebook Instant Messaging Confirmed

Facebook is also launching a web chat product called Facebook Chat “in the coming weeks.” We first wrote about the new feature last week. Users will now see a chat bar on the bottom of all Facebook pages, showing which of their friends are online, who they’re chatting with currently, and other controls. A screen shot is above (pardon the quality).

Chat will currently be one-to-one only, although there is no limit to the number of chat sessions that can be open at any one time. Conversations are archived, and messages to people who are set to “offline” (either not on Facebook or explicitly not using chat) will be sent to their Facebook inbox instead.

For now the chat feature is not Jabber compliant, meaning it cannot be accessed outside of Facebook on clients like Trillian or Adium. They are also not yet adding API or platform functionality to chat, so third party applications cannot access chat and build on top of it. The product will be enhanced over time, though, said product manager Peter Deng. No integration of AIM, Gtalk, or any other protocol yet either.

Users won’t have to install chat as an addition application; it will automatically show up at the bottom of the screen for everyone and there’s no way to completely remove it, although you can minimize it substantially when not in use.

There’s no “away status” – just online, offline, or “idle” (which is triggered after an unspecified amount of time not doing anything on the site).

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Facebook Press Event: Our (Almost) Live Notes

Mar 18, 2008 General

Facebook held a fairly large press event today around privacy and other new products at 10am PT at their Palo Alto headquarters. There were a number of announcements made, although live blogging of the event was not permitted. These are my raw notes from the event, which I am posting immediately afterwards. A wrapup post will be posted shortly. We’ll also update this post with pictures.

Summary: new and simplified privacy controls taking advantage of friend lists (to be released later tonight), and confirmation of Facebook Chat (that’s the official name; to be released in the coming weeks).

Matt Cohler, VP Product Development:

Facebook wants to satisfy the desire for better more personal communication among people who know each other. Facebook also wants to give users better control over their information: what they share, when they share, and who they share it with. It’s reeally important to give people the right tools to keep them in control.

Two parts to this: 1) a need for really powerful tools, and 2) a need for really simple/intuitive tools that not just power users can use

Originally Facebook was only for American college students so product principles were fairly easy to follow; just had to work within a college network. But today, four years later, many more types of users, types of relationships, etc.

Currently there are 67 million active users, 2/3 of which are outside the U.S. Go back 18 months and 90% of users were in the U.S.

When first launched, it seemed to be pushing the envelope to ask users to put cell phones up on their profile, even more surprised that people actually were doing it. Nowadays, few people think twice about it.

Naomi Gleit, Product Manager:

Announcing Privacy Settings For Friend Lists

Two changes launching tonight, or by tomorrow morning, related to improvements in the privacy interface. Users can now set privacy setting related to friend lists, which were announced a couple of months ago.

Also a simpler interface that makes it easier to find what you are looking for.

New friends of friends privacy options. Can also share information with people you are connected to. Much more detailed options.

Users can create private groups of their friends. Naomi created a co-worker friend list. Easy to send messages to co-worker lists, send status messages just to co workers, etc. But the main announcement today is the integration of friend lists with privacy. You can share information with all friends, some groups, or all friends except some groups. Pretty much all data you add to Facebook can be specified as intended for certain people (photo albums, contact info, etc.) and not for others

Friends can be in as many groups as you like.

When you make friends with someone on Facebook, you can decide what list to add them to, or create a new list on the fly.

Your friend lists are private; only you can see which of your friends go into each one.

This is not replacing social map details, where you say how you know someone when you add a friend. Those will still remain on the site.

If you used limited profiles previously, the friends you set to view that are now grouped under a limited profile friend list.

The new privacy interface and options apply to third party profile boxes as well, so you can choose to show certain apps only to some friends

Peter Deng, Product Manager:

Announcing Facebook Chat

They are giving us a preview, it’s launching in the coming weeks. It will open up a new channel of communication to allow users to chat. Chat UI on the bottom of the browser, exists as a permanent bar wherever you go on the site. There’s a friends button in this bar on the right; you can click on a friend’s name and start chatting with them in the browser.

Chat conversations can be minimized or popped out of the interface into a separate window. Eventually you will be able to chat by friends list. Chat works on all browsers.

This is not Jabber, but they are considering Jabber integration. May or may not integrate. If they can support it later, they will. No API support for Facebook Chat right now (ie platform developers can’t build anything with it).

Just one-to-one chat now (you can’t talk with multiple people in the same window). Chats are archived and history can be cleared. There’s no “away” status — just online or offline. You can set it to offline even when you’re browsing Facebook, so that no one can message you. If someone tries to message you when offline, it’ll prompt them to send you a regular Facebook message.

Question to Matt Cohler about Beacon issues in the past. “We just screwed it up” he says. But he is also thinks it’s now an excellent product, despite rushing it out the door initially.

Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer:

Took questions but did not present. Spoke for awhile on the use of user images and names in promoting products, says that the opt out option is fine legally for users, and that they give permission to use their likeness and name simply by using facebook.

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Instablogs Negotiating $3 Million Round

Mar 18, 2008 General

Blog network/ citizen journalism site Instablogs is currently negotiating a $3 million round of funding, sources familiar with the deal have told TechCrunch.

The India based Instablogs launched in October 2005 originally as a blog network. The site has changed over time to become predominantly a citizen journalism site that competes with services such as Newsvine, complete with mainstream media syndication deals.

We’ve seen a number of documents related to Instablog’s quest for funding, but as no deal has been finalized we won’t publish them in full, however some interesting stats and quotes as follows:

• Instablogs is doing 2.5+ million page views per month with 12,000 registered members
• $300,000 in revenue last year
• The company is profitable and is pitching its location as a competitve advantage cost wise

From the SWAT analysis Instablog lists its Weaknesses as a high attrition rate of writers, low CPM rates and 30% unsold inventory.

Projections:

Instablogs says that it wants to use the funding to:

Expand the business model, hire key management, technology development which includes but not limited to buying more servers and additional bandwidth, partnership and alliances with more News Agencies, to invest and retain core writers, and online and offline advertising. 


I can remember covering Instablogs the day it launched and it was a rocky start. The site had 46 mostly empty blogs and didn’t initially gain a lot of positive coverage. Today lack of content is a problem they don’t have, with a fairly well-rounded portal covering a wide variety of topic areas. The numbers are fairly impressive, and should they take funding it would further legitimize the blogging/ CitJ space as a business proposition.

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