Recently I heard from Tweeto again, who wanted to know if I knew David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, now owned by Yahoo. I don't know him.
He was asking because his project The Comfort Spot has been growing and, as he explains in the interview below, much of the traffic is the 'Tumblr generation' - a young, bright and tech-savvy group of international users who seek what might seem counterintuitive: Genuine online connection bolstered, not hindered, by anonymity.
The site has many of the social media trappings you would recognize: comment threads, up-votes, emoticons. But the nature of the language and iconography is decidedly gentler and the premise is unified around one key thing: support for people hurting.
Because Karp has captured the imagination of so many young users, and Tweeto wants to capture their angst in a community that can help relive it, he feels they should connect. Whether that happens is well beyond my control, but in the meantime I was again fascinated by Tweeto's approach. He takes what many see as a problem - this time anonymity - and makes it part of the solution. It's obviously not a novel idea, but one that seems to resonate with users who weren't born when Compuserve chatrooms served a similar purpose.
In this email interview, Tweeto discusses his own views on being an anonymous user, why monetizing his sites is the worst part of the experience for him and where he sees Karp fitting into all of this.
Tell me about the technology. Are you filtering our negativity or is that a completely human function?
I think it's safe to say that it's both.
But if you're expecting to hear about sophisticated algorithms, that is not the case.
Yes, there are 'background lines of code' that will drive souls (that's how I call my users) to act in a more positive way, but the main negativity is being filtered out by the DNA of the comfort spot.
The community have tools to move negativity out of the system and they indeed doing that, I'm asking them about it, and also monitoring that cold data - the fact is simple, the comfort spot is built from the 'good bricks' of the human soul.
How many request for comfort are you receiving each day?
Without being too specific, these days, I receive between 500 to 800 asks for comfort a day. For comparison, a year ago it was somewhere between 10 to 20 a day. It's a fast growing number.
The comfort spot recently passed the 100,000 ask for comfort posts and over half a million comments were made. Over 97% of the posts receive feedback.
When I opened the comfort spot I saw about 98% feedback and I was sure the number will drop drastically as the ask for comforts posts numbers will go higher but I'm happy to see that it remained just about the same.
What interests me is the use of anonymity as a positive force. What's your opinion about anonymity on the web in general?
Anonymity is a very tricky business.
I understand how people can connect anonymity with bad behavior, I see it today in Israel (The government launched a controversial pilot for collecting personal citizen information in a single database) when people say 'If you are a good citizen, you shouldn't have nothing to hide.' But that's wrong because it's not that we want to hide but it's that we simply don't want to share this information. There are many personal pieces of information that we don't want to share with anyone and we don't want it to be connected to us - but it doesn't say that we are doing something bad.
Regarding the comfort spot, I will say it again: DNA.
I'll explain - If I took a large random group of people and placed them in the comfort spot on day one, I believe that some would be helpful, some would do bad and at the end they would all go away.
But because the comfort spot grew from nothing and it has a steady growth, the pioneers that came in first chose to live by the rules that I gave them (be kind and helpful), and as new souls are coming, they know that if they want to be part of this community, they have to follow the community rules and so on.
What's the philosophical extension of The Comfort Spot from your original project The Quiet Place Project?
It all begins with the fact that the young generation has been born into a world that asks them to think about what people will say about them before they think about who they are. Social networking as I see it today is about how you look, how many people liked your picture, how many levels did accomplished etc. It's about how you want society to see you.
The quiet place showed me that there is a majority of people that want some time to themselves. They don't want to be bothered all the time with likes and shares and they want to dedicate more time for their true selves.
I took the quiet place as a case study and wanted to see if there is a need for other type of social networking. Type that starts with your deepest needs and cannot be covered with filters. If you're sad, you can't just place a youtube video and hope for someone to pay attention - you have to say it. You have to be yourself, you have to ask for help and know that people will care and help you.
The comfort spot is different because you don't have any filters, there are no masks and it's all about you, the real you. And if it's not about you, then it's about others that need you to help them accept themselves as they are.
Did the virality of The Quiet Place Project make it easier or harder to develop the newer websites?
It helped of course because I didn't need to go and look for users, I already had them coming. But that doesn't mean that the success of the comfort spot is because of that. Users really don't care about your projects unless it's really useful. At best case, they will tell you that they love it, but they will never come back. On the comfort spot they are coming back each and every day so I know I'm doing something right.
I'm curious where business fits into your models. I've noticed advertisements on your site - is that your primary approach?
I won't lie. The business is the most painful issue for me.
First because I really don't care about it (it's awfully boring and I care about the creative stuff) and second because I have to deal with it. The project cost money (servers, database, etc) and I'm trying to invest all my time developing it.
I planted ads. I don't like this solution, but for now it's doing fine. In fact, I tried to raise an Indiegogo campaign that failed mainly because my audience don't have credit cards. Really, they told me that after I asked for comfort about it (I was down after the campaign failed). They told me to put as many ads as I can to keep the place alive. So I did it.
I have ideas about more business models. There is great data to use and analyze and other ways that I don't want to talk about now.
But for now, the ads are giving me the time I need to perfect the service and make it available to anyone who needs it.
You mentioned that you would like help from David Karp. I'm curious what kind of help you want from him?
We share the same user base. My users are coming straight from Tumblr and I can clearly see that I give them tools to do something that they can't do on Tumblr.
Tumblr is all about sharing great content, but when it comes to the deep soul of the users, the comfort spot is a complementary product for that.
I would really like to work closely with Tumblr and reach out to the wide scope of the young users on the web.
Tumblr users are already finding the comfort spot, but with the help of the Tumblr stuff things can go much faster for me.
What kind of development support do your receive in Israel? Is there a supportive developer community where you live?
As for myself, I tend to live under the radar and do everything by myself but when I've asked for support from new startups such as Hello Doctor, or TopTab I got a lot of support about business models, and growth issues. We have in Israel a great and supportive startup community, not just in the field of development but on other fields as well.
Since the Google-Waze acquisition, everyone saw that the Israelis can be a major part of the next generation of the web, and I will do my best to make that assumption into a reality.
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