Fanpop is a network of social portals where communities of fans can discover and share content and participate in discussions around their favorite topics of interest.
Rather than visiting multiple websites and forums or hunting and pecking through search results, passionate users bring the best content together in one place. Fans can submit, organize, and rate digital content such as videos, articles, sites, and blogs for topics.
This saves people the time and trouble of having to scour the web for quality content that other knowledgeable fans have already discovered. The underlying belief is that people that are fanatical about something tend to be the best and most reliable source of information for that specific something.
The site combines a little bit of everything: polls, social bookmarking, social network, news, and forums. The site has multiple portals, so that Fanpop can keep topics somewhat contained since a fifty-year old mother of three who is a fan of knitting, luxury travel, and parenting is unlikely to go into the Britney Spears, geeks or Being a Man spots and vice versa.
Here is a list of ten spots that illustrate how the site is used:
Maybe some fans (if I have any left) will start a forum called the “G spot.”
Thanks for the blog love Guy. Even if all of your French readership abandons you, you’ll always have the Fanpop team as fans (all four of us)!
*************
Dave,
You guys are all Asian, right? Maybe I do a list of quotes about Asians. :-)
Guy
Whenever I see a new bookmarking site I always check how many user reviews it takes to get to the #1 position.
The highest number I found was 10 votes.
From using delicious and stumbleupon I think the key requirement to becoming a successful social bookmark site is a toolbar. Make it require no effort to bookmark and you have a shot of getting people to incorporate this into their surfing habits.
I’m still waiting for someone to develop an outsourced company for bloggers who are too lazy to submit their posts to all of these sites. Maybe even include automatic vote inflation like User/Submitter.
Is this your account?
DOH. nevermind.
Gave it a swing. Cool website, I really like the user interface.
One thing I’ve seen on other sites that is good is having some kind of ratio between submitted sites and votes.
Also having a filter on a user submitting lots of entries from the same web address at the same time will help reduce self-promotional blog spam.
This class of site has incredible potential – I’m thinking also of Mary Hodder’s Dabble where as well as tagging and rating users can also request “content” from each other. In Dabble’s case that means requesting video excerpts when you’re looking around for content snippets to make your next low cost video. I guess in the caes of fanpop it could be asking for content related to any of these special areas of interest. It’s what a search engine should really have, a request engine. Any plans there Dave?
With a name like “Fanpop,” I don’t expect to see many 50-year old mothers hanging out on the site.
Fanpop appears to own the portals and everything posted to them. (The FAQ says the “community” owns the site, but the terms seem to indicate Fanpop does). If it’s true that a small number of hard-core fans contribute the majority of the value, I wonder what will happen as those fans start to recognize that fact and want a real share in the success of “their” portals (either monetarily or by some more substantial form of non-monetary ownership) I hate to take Nicholas Carr’s side on this, but it does seem a little unfair.
This seems, at an admittedly fairly cursory glance, mostly like a cheap ploy in naming to cash in on the vogue of convergence culture without actually giving fans much ownership. It otherwise looks like a copycat of TopTenSources.
As someone who’s fairly heavily involved in online fan communities and has been for many years, I honestly can’t see this appealing to actual fan communities at all, unless we could take the software and run with it on our own hosted sites. They should call it MarketingPop and not bother trying to cash in on people’s honest fannishness of shows, people, products or services. It’s not hard for a fan to tell the difference between a site – or a portal or node or whatever – run by sincere fans and one that’s only driven by business model. Shockingly, fans actually know the value of our own value-added, and aren’t really all that keen to rush and give it away.
curdnerd wrote: “With a name like “Fanpop,” I don’t expect to see many 50-year old mothers hanging out on the site.”
As opposed to 50-year old mothers using sites with names like “Yahoo”, “Google”, “Amazon” and “Orbitz”?
erica – i guess I don’t see it as an either/or proposition like you. i’ve spent some time this morning on the site (more than a cursory glance) and, while the site isn’t for everyone, it may be appealing to interests/hobbies that (a) don’t have an established hub and are looking for a platform or (b) interests that want some nice digg/delicious-like functionality and/or folks that don’t know where to go for a given topic (on some of the fanpop miniportals, they list a number of fansites that you might deem competitive).
btw – i’ve been to plenty of “sincere” fansites that are monetizing their site just as eagerly as fanpop is so i can’t knock them for trying make a sustainable business.
I use Bloglines for all my aggregation needs. The ringtone crowd might go for fanpop, but I prefer the factual passion from wikipedia or answers.com
As for online communites personally I prefer things like hostboard.com, where we can all be experts.
Fanpop : l’agrégateur malin
Pour ceux qui lisent des infos et des blogs d’entrepreneurs et créateurs d’entreprises, rendez-vous sur un service qui se nomme Fanpop.com (en anglais), dans le spot entrepreneurs et start-up.
Il permet aux passionnés de partager leurs news et…
Chinese people can’t do business with indian people…watch the video. This guy is just too funny.
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I guess I should probably chime in at this point and respond to some of the comments and questions. First of all, thanks to everyone for checking out the site, it’s always helpful to get feedback and opinions, positive or negative. We actually conceived of and designed this site out of personal experience building online communities with sites we’ve previously launched for passionate fans.
The reason we came up with Fanpop was to deal with the limitations we felt constricted by on other “social” websites like social networks, message boards, social bookmarking sites or fansites managed by a single editor. We wanted to give users and fans the ability to efficiently and cooperatively share and communicate with one another. Each spot is a platform where fans can share with other fans content that they’ve found on the web about their shared passion whether it be a video clip or an article or a new website. We found that message boards like PHPBB aren’t a very organized way of doing this and but general social bookmarking sites are lacking any tangible community building or interaction between users.
The fans have ownership in that they create the spots and as they gain a reputation for submitting good quality content and generating discussion, they earn points and medals that yield administrative rights to that spot. Their reputation is judged by their peers and the community. By creating this network, we feel like the best content on the web for any given topic will aggregate organically and be filtered for quality by those who know it best, the experts and devoted fans.
The benefit of having a unified network of these spots is that you can manage your participation and activity in one place as compared to the fragmentation that we see out there with dozens of community sites for any given topic. We just got tired of having to visit and login to all these different sites to keep track of our content and discussions.
Ultimately, the goal was to create a gateway and destination where people can go to and discover new content and find communities around the things they care about most in a fun and easy way.
Thanks for the replies, Dave. You said:
The fans have ownership in that they create the spots and as they gain a reputation for submitting good quality content and generating discussion, they earn points and medals that yield administrative rights to that spot.
See… that right there makes me feel all gross and skeevy. It’s a huge turnoff. That’s not the kind of community interactions I’m used to finding in communities of fans, and it’s a kind of commodified moderation of interpersonal contact that is exactly the reason I choose to frequent fan-run websites and in general can’t stand the official sites run by cultural-content owners. You don’t build a community through points and medals, and not too surprisingly, the thing that’s most valuable to a fan about a fan community is the community – much more so, often, than the content itself. Half the time the content is only the catalyst, and it’s by no means the only thing we’re coming back for. Points don’t make me feel ownership, in general, they make me feel patronized.
The fan communities I’m a part of have all moved beyond PHPBB… in most cases, back in 2002. We use social blogging communities like Livejournal, as well as delicious, etc. We’re constantly evolving our own tools. So something new isn’t necessarily a winner just cos it’s new, but there might be room for it in the panoply of useful tools, if we’re convinced it’s worth having.
Essentially – if you want to succeed in many fan communities, certainly in any pre-existing fan community, you’re going to need to make a very solid case as to what service you’re providing that’s any better than what else is out there, AND why we should trust you, specifically, with our content. Ownership of and control over our content, even as it’s being shared, means a great deal – a huge deal – to many fans I know. It’s a much larger hurdle than it is with many other communities.
All that said, now that it’s after 5 I did have the chance to look at FanPop more closely, and I’m willing to take a bigger look around to see if there’s something worth finding there. The basic mission sounds nice enough at core, and in digging deeper I can see more evidence of its being a sincere effort rather than just a business model. I’m still not convinced that I need it, when I’ve already got more excellent fan news and content streaming at me through the sites I’m already a part of than I could digest meaningfully even if it were my job, and in general with deep enough specificity to my personal interests that I can’t really imagine anything else meeting those needs as well. I checked the FanPop spots that exist for the things I’m a fan of. So far, it’s all too broad and general and vague, the sort of stuff I don’t bother looking for myself because inevitably if it’s worth knowing it’ll show up in one of my existing feeds without my trying. I’d need subcategories within the larger fan spots. I’m not interested in “Apple,” for example, I’m interested in my model of MacBook and its associated problems and accessories, plus MacOSX tricks & bug news. A spot for “Apple” right now doesn’t give me anything new, doesn’t filter things for me in a useful way.
What’s the monetizing model? And is this something the 4 of you are doing fulltime? As a fan, I tend to distrust the idea that quality fan content is enough to support many fulltime jobs, without sacrificing something important. If the primary thing that’s monetizable to you about your site is the content your users add to it, the service needs to be useful enough that your users don’t mind that you’re making a living off their work (yes, and your coding skilz). IMHO, useful enough that the users are or would be willing to pay for it directly, or buy associated merchandise (see Livejournal and Television Without Pity models). Prove me wrong! :)
Convince me I need FanPop, and that I shouldn’t be skeeved out by the points etc. Convince me that you have a solid model for community. And convince me that the sincerity isn’t going to suffer because keeping things monetizable ends up becoming a bigger priority to you and/or your venture capital than making the site what its community of users wants and needs.
I’ve been using fanpop for a month now and have been enjoying it a lot (so consider me a biased user).
Strength of the site seems to be in the serendipity of discovering new sites or interesting articles I might have otherwise overlooked (actually, I found this article via the fanpop frontpage). It hasn’t completely replaced my main haunts, but it does provide a nice complement and I much prefer it to delicious which is less topically oriented.
By the way engtech. They don’t have a toolbar that I’m aware of, but there is a bookmarklet that you can put on your browser’s bookmark bar to add links to the site (I’ve used it without a hitch). Not as fancy as a full fledged toolbar, but not sure that any of us want yet another specialized browser add-on.
Reality Check: Fanpop
by: Guy Kawasaki Fanpop is a network of social portals where communities of fans can discover and share content and participate in discussions around their favorite topics of interest….
Social Networking Instead of Emails
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Guy:
Thanks for the Fanpost info. It continued my recent thinking about some kind of social networking platform that companies could create. In other words, use the technology available to design an up-to-date method for sharing and archiving information. I’m not clear on all of the details but I am clear that it makes sense.
Steve Roesler
DayTripr : Monetizing Other People’s Work
Guy Kawasaki’s recent blog post on Fanpop hit a nerve with me. DayTripr is going to be a site that makes use of “user generated content,” but I’m uncomfortably aware of the nasty power imbalance that that can imply. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, a…
It’s understandable that you would want to use your blog to get feedback on projects you’re involved in. It’s common nettiquite to disclose your involvement whenever you’re writing about one.
So Guy, is this one of the companies you’re currently invested in? Or put another way, what is your relationship with Fanpop?
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Just friends. If/when Garage invests or I receive compensation, I will note that in the post.
Guy
Thanks for the tip! Just signed up, looks interesting. Connecting with people based on your common interests. Cool! I’ll let you know what I think!
André Hedetoft
Geek Movie Director
Help me sell 1000 Save André Hedetoft T-shirts so that I get to make my next movie over at http://www.andrehedetoft.com
Super Fans Unite on FanPop!
Fanpop is a web site devoted to making the web a happier place for passionate fans by creating a spot for them to connect, discovery and share. Fanpop launched in August 2006, and has been making the rounds in the
Reality Check: Fanpop
by: Guy Kawasaki Fanpop is a network of social portals where communities of fans can discover and share content and participate in discussions around their favorite topics of interest….