Social Media – The Company

If you haven’t checked out Social Media yet, you should. 

On this blog, we’ve looked at distributed businesses, app platforms, networks of apps, and distributed apps – but I’m not sure if we’ve seen any distributed networks of apps before.

Social Media is a network and platform for applications that reside on other sites.  Developers within the Social Media network get help with app hosting, promotion, and monetization.   

On one level, this sounds very similar to what companies like Slide and RockYou are doing – cranking out applications which serve as a footprint for the cross promotion of other apps and / or an ad network.  But the big difference is that Social Media is not developing these apps themselves – they’ve opened up development to anybody.

On another level, Social Media could be seen as a slightly more integrated, more unified, more networked widget / app platform than what we’ve seen from say a Widgetbox or a Clearspring.  But while Widgetbox and Clearspring seem to be primarily about helping companies widgetize existing content and functionality, Social Media seems more geared towards native apps - apps that have been built solely to exist on a distributed basis.

And a final way to look at Social Media is as a Facebook F8 kind of platform, but one that doesn’t care if the apps reside on Facebook.  While Facebook incents developers by offering the opportunity to distribute apps to 30M active profiles via already established networks of friends, Social Media offers (along with hosting and monetization) the opportunity to distribute apps via a network of other apps.

Is this enough of an incentive to get developers involved?  How would a Social Media affiliation impact a developer whose app is getting acquired?  How is Social Media going to serve ads on MySpace?

Despite these questions, this is a fascinating idea for a company. 

Social Media has already raised $1M in funding and is coming off a successful AppDevCon conference with attendance from many of the most successful Facebook app developers. Seth Goldstein (Attention Trust) is the CEO.

Comments

[Hooman]

These guys are great. We are big fans of Seth and Dave. Look out for something on the horizon from Clearspring soon. :)