I was just such a big dork myself until this afternoon. Pinterest, it seems, is one of the hottest new startups online - growing fast, piling up almost 10,000 glowing reviews for its iPhone app and now reportedly raising a large sum of money at a 4x pre-money valuation. Perhaps the fact that you and I both are just now hearing about this thriving year-old site after it is raising a lot of money means we're hopelessly behind on this one.
Pinterest hasn't gotten a lot of press before, though. That could be because it's a visual bookmarking site used primarily by women (apparently) , and the male-dominated tech press is just less likely to notice success in that sector. It's a great looking service though and a lot of fun to use. There are certainly ways it could be improved, but it's clearly catching on.
Monster.com launched an iPhone version of its BeKnown app on Tuesday but the app offered more frustration than help for job seekers or professional recruiters and showed how out-classsed Monster is in the networking sector.
The app, which builds off of a Facebook app Monster launched in June, looks more like a marketing department's effort to get more Facebook users to use the job search site rather than "a solution for job seekers and recruiters looking to manage just one network of contacts," as it bills itself.
Formspring, the ask-me-anything Q&A social network, has just launched its first native iOS app. The big new feature for Formspring is photo sharing, which is incorporated into both questions and answers from the app. The iOS interface builds nicely on the website's UI makeover and new community features added earlier this year.
Formspring's Sarahjane Sacchetti says that the app is focused on keeping things "super-simple" for users in order to drive more activity. It's built around posting questions, answering, and viewing content from friends. Formspring says that over 75% of traffic to their existing mobile website comes from iOS, so this more powerful native app should see rapid adoption among Formspring's current users.
PostSecret, the beloved weekly blog that allows anyone to anonymously share a postcard containing a personal secret, has launched an iPhone app that expands the project out onto the social and mobile Web. In addition to viewing the regular Sunday Secrets - the physical postcards - featured on PostSecret.com, users can create and share digital secrets and browse them by time and location.
The idea of broadcasting your darkest secrets across the Internet might sound counter-intuitive, but the app does an amazing job of reassuring users of their privacy and security. Not only has PostSecret built a heartfelt, loving application, it has raised the privacy bar for app developers everywhere.
A new iPad app called Groovebug just launched. It uses your iTunes music collection to create "an iPad magazine tailored to your musical tastes." The familiarities to Flipboard seem a little forced. You do use the swiping motion to go from one page to another but, outside of that, it doesn't feel much like a magazine experience. Also, Flipboard is more sophisticated about how it embeds external content. Although I did like how Groovebug embeds YouTube videos.
That's not to say that Groovebug doesn't have a lot of potential. I think they're onto something in regards to bringing the Flipboard experience to music. The personalized (through your iTunes) aggregation is a good start, but I'd like Groovebug to help me discover more music and media content about music too.
"You are what you do, that's the philosophy of Mightybell," says Gina Bianchini, the former CEO of sprawling, Andreesen-backed network of social networks Ning, about her new startup Mightybell, which launches today. "We've spent the last 5 years calling success the number of friends, fans and followers we've accumlated - [but now] people using social software want more. Mightybell seeks to offer a simple way to take new social technologies and turn them into compelling experiences for people in the real world. We think the next innovation in social software will be its impact on daily life."
Mightybell opens a limited beta today and is charging $1 for access. (Cool idea.) Instead of publishing blog posts or random status messages, Mightybell users will publish experiences - with step-by-step instructions so that other users can sign on to have the same experiences themselves. "People of action think big and then act incrementally," Bianchini says. "Mightybell provides a lightweight way to structure that." It's an ambitious vision, making aspiration programmable, measured and social. Mightybell's not alone in this field, but Bianchini says she and her team's aim is to use their experience to out-execute competitors and build the richest, most compelling service in this emerging space. I don't know if it's going to work, but it's an interesting idea.
Often in tech reporting, you'll hear a lot about launches, acquisitions and failures. What you don't hear enough about are the makers who iterate in relative silence. For all of the hyped startups of this world (Color anyone?), there are a lot of startups that chug away without the fanfare. So to celebrate those startups building solid and useful products, we're starting a new series called Happy Appiversary. As the perhaps clunky name suggests, we'll focus on startups that are celebrating an anniversary and review their progress.
Lanyrd has been described as a "Wikipedia for conferences," because it aggregates digital content from conferences - such as slideshows and videos. It's also a social network of sorts for conference attendees and enables non-attendees to track events virtually. Lanyrd celebrated its first anniversary last week, according to a blog post by co-founder Natalie Downe. Let's check out how Lanyrd has developed over the past year and why you should use this excellent service.
Joshua Schachter, founder of the world-changing social networking service Delicious, late last night quietly unveiled his newest work. It's called Jig and it's a site for posting your needs and getting responses from other users.
In many ways "what do you need" is the most basic of questions for a tool to ask a human. Jig applies the best practices of contemporary lightweight social networks to the problem of people filling each others' needs online. It's not fully baked yet, but it's got a team filled with rockstars, a beguiling simplicity to it and it may very well unfold into a compelling service to use. I began testing the service a few months ago but news about it unfolded publicly last night on Techmeme.
TheInterviewr is a new mashup that makes it super, super simple to record telephone interviews online using your existing telephone. It is a dream come true and for now at least - it's free.
The system uses APIs from Twilio and Box.net to let users schedule interviews with contacts, enter notes for the interviews and upload associated files to a central place. Then, when it comes time to do the interview, both parties are sent an SMS to remind them it's about to begin. The person performing the interview clicks a button on TheInterviewr website and both peoples' phones are called automatically. Have a conversation, refer to your notes and documents, then click the same button to end the call. A recording will be available to listen back to immediately. It's like magic.
Stop me if you've heard this one: A service that pulls in your feeds from around the Web for you to read. A service that provides a storefront for discovering and subscribing to Web publications. A service that lets you follow updates from your favorite Web personalities. A service that personalizes the news for you based on your interests and friends. A service that emails you a digest of your top stories. A service that cleans up Web articles and presents them to you in a pretty interface. A service that lets you quickly save articles to read later.
Now, name that service... Well wait, those each sound like the features of a different app you've heard of, maybe even used, don't they? Google Reader, Apple and Amazon stores, Twitter, News.me, Flipboard, Read It Later. How many of these things do you use for reading? More than one? Now, imagine if you only needed one reading app. That's what Adeel Raza, founder of Readings, imagines.
