Pheed Offers Best Of All Social Networks In One Paltform

By: Kevin Green  |   October 18th, 2012   |   Business, Mobile Apps, News, Social Media

Pheed is a new social network that wants to bring together text, image and video content creation and sharing onto one platform. The startup launched its web based version on October 12 and will be releasing its iPhone app fairly soon.

 

Currently, smartphone owners are using their phones to take pictures, write text-based messages or updates and make videos. All these are then uploaded to various social networks using a number of different apps. All this can get troublesome because of the different apps and social networks involved. Pheed wants to streamline this process by giving users their own “channel” to share their content with the world. Users will each have one location from where they can share “text, photos, videos, voice-notes and audio clips, and live broadcasts” which can be followed by other users within the network. Followers can also set alerts based on the type of content that is released. For example, if a user follows a band’s channel they can set alerts to receive updates when the band releases a video update.

 

O.D. Kobo, the co-founder of Pheed, sat down with his staff and chose the best features of all the social networks in the marketplace. They put all these features together in one place to create their social network. He stated that, “In the past five years I haven’t seen anyone do anything as masterful as them. But after two years I kept thinking, Why can’t I do more? Why didn’t they introduce video? Why can’t I upload an album? Wouldn’t it be interesting if Instagram offered text? Would Twitter have been shaking in their boots a little bit? Maybe it was necessary for other platforms to come about.”

 

Pheed and its founders are trying to use different models to attract users and also make money. They are using artists like Chris Brown, David Guetta, and Ashley Tisdale to bring in the crowds and are even offering channel owners the chance to make money by charging people to view content, a major pull for many.

 

Pheed users can either use a monthly subscription or a pay-per-view strategy to charge others. The channel owner will get to keep half of the money that is generated while Pheed will split its half with third-party processors. The social network will work with their current monetization model for now and are looking at adding advertising in the future as the site and user base grows.

 

Kobo spoke about the company’s business model and stated that, “That whole model where people pay x amount for a video or song is a bit outdated. What social media is today is about selling bits and pieces of peoples’ lives. It’s not necessarily selling that one song, it’s selling access to me.”

 

The seven members of Pheed pooled together $2.5 million of their own money to start their social network and plan on getting 10-million users to reach critical mass. With stiff competition from Facebook and others, Kobo explains the chances of success by saying that, “The wheel had to come about before the car. There are stages, like how Friendster came, then MySpace, then Facebook, each one improving on and adding to the format. There was Twitter and now Pheed–the evolution of a genre.”

 

Source: Fast Company