2008 March | Social Media & Web 2.0 Website Information

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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FixYa

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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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