Fanpop kicks a$$! I like the user rankings, etc. Very easy to use and pretty addictive. Personally, the Jessica Alba site is my favorite!

Thanks for the flattering post Marshall! We’ll keep an eye out on new Guinea Pig posts from you. I just wanted to also point out another feature and point of differentiation and distance ourselves from “social networks” that we seem to keep getting lumped together with. As you so elegantly stated, we’re more about the content and community than about the individuals. But for individuals they can express themselves and who they are by joining different spots that they’re fans of. The difference is that by joining these spots and becoming a fan of another user, it’s actually useful because you are essentially subscribing to new content that is being added to your topics and recent ratings from people you’re a fan of. So instead of surfing around trying to find new stuff to check out, content you care about is being pushed to you. It’s something we’re referring to as “social browsing”. Thanks again for the great post Marshall! And we hope everyone has a chance to check out the site. Have fun!

Fanpop and Squidoo aren’t at all alike. I think of Fanpop as more of a social network creator. Squidoo’s lenses aren’t ’social’ they are more individual.

I really liked the interface, the ease of creating a ’spot’, etc. It could use more Vox-like features (like importing specific photos from Flickr, etc.), but as a beta, it’s pretty awesome.

I’m totally a fan of your Guinea Pig network. It rocks.

I thought I was getting tired of all the collect-share-bookmark sites, but this one is just so pretty. It’s like candy for my eyes! And their registration process is beautifully efficient. Other sites, please take note.

I am impressed by Fanpops offering, but as i wrote to them and blogged about, they need to offer feeds of their aggregated feeds or i doubt they will get out of the niche idle time that’s required by URL based experiences of this sort. IE, I would gladly take a headline feed for my morning coffee RSS aggregation browse to check on my fanatic love of let’s say “Star Track’ but i wouldn’t bother going to go check it everyday as a discrete URL. Well, actually maybe i would if i were a true treky.

But, alas, i’m not. I’m a fan of The Daily Show though and would take that FanPop feed, feel fine about a click to through FanPop for full link info, and then go to the article. That’s a ‘double-click’ i’m willing to do. Is there an infrastructure or legal issue here that i’m not seeing?

When i did click through on my Daily Show article of interest, while i’m there i may add a link to the dog fan area. All the while, proving a viable growth plan worth investing in. Because we are a fan fantatic society, arn’t we?

Nice, clean, fun site.

I’m surprised not to see any revenue sharing - or did I just miss it?

This is a nicely done web app… I can see it taking off… Seems like it was created by the Digg team… has that feel… if its 1/2 as successful… Fanpop will be a winner!

Good luck guys.

It’s like Digg had a massive train wreck with Youtube (as evidenced by all the copycat UI elements). I guess good luck on getting momentum…just wish it was a little more original.

Quick follow up to my post:
They’ve got a classy team that wrote me back to say that they will offer feeds at their next milestone - there are no barriers to widespread adoption now!

I think that to call them a copycat is not recognizing that sometimes a killer app is in improving upon a combination of trends out there. This feels like an improvement in the sense that it’s a format where people can feel useful being obsessive about their fanatisms. And, they actually are being useful - and it’s a lot easier to look at than a URL list.

A very similiar concept to Boxxet which is still invitation only.

I actually blogged about this site yesterday (can’t believe I actually got to something before TC). I’m completely addicted to Fanpop already. It really does combine some nice social networking features, and for a beta it’s pretty slick. I also e-mailed them about RSS feeds and they said they’d be coming soon. I think this one could actually make it because it’s got definite non-geek appeal. Who isn’t a fan of something?

I think Postbubble hits the nail on the head:

“Unfortunately, I think they are ahead of their time and there are just too many places to be contributing content these days relative to the actual number of contributors. Places to share your enthusiasm for topics are all over the place and it’s somewhat better to start with one topic and go from there. Fanpop is going for a massive portal to everything and I think that they are biting off too much to chew. If you look at a site like digg for example, they started with focused content and a great idea for displaying it. Not to compare Fanpop to digg however the idea is that for community-based businesses you need to pick one community and go for it. Otherwise, you’ll never hit a single topic hard enough to grab the participation you need to make your site worthwhile. Overall, I’m sinking Fanpop because they are starting too big with an idea that requires a hefty market participation that just isn’t there.”

Without some focus I just don’t see this drawing in enough people. Fans of completely different subjects have different needs and don’t want a generic system that has a generic feature set. This is not entirely dissimilar to Yahoo Groups, which is cluttered and fragmented. The site is pretty, but the functionality is extremely basic and I don’t see any compelling reason to use this when there are already other online communities and portals that specifically cater to the things I’m interested in. With generic social nets like MySpace having so much popularity I think the new social nets have to focus on a specific niche if they’re going to succeed. They need to have some differentiation and a business model. The data Fanpop collects could be the basis for a business model, however with so many topics, the user base will be fragmented and activity low on the majority of spots especially since the functionality is so basic and doesn’t add anything new. It’s much easier to build up a user base around a specific niche and then focus on building a real business model around that niche (unless AdWords is their long-term model). It also helps if the founders have domain expertise around that niche.

I disagree Realist. A basic feature-set does not necessarily preclude success. As for the compelling reason to use the site, I think folks are discounting the long-tail nature of this play. While some of the larger categories may be saturated and offer *less* of a compelling reason to use the site. I’ve already seen several long-tail categories that don’t appear to that well served by what’s already out there on the ‘net.

As for the fragmentation issue, I’m not sure that’s a big issue either. It’s a bit chaotic at the homepage level, but the individual spots seem to be self contained. If they (or their users) can promote the individual spots and nail the seo on individual spots so the organic results are decent, there’s no reason that some users wouldn’t exclusively visit specific spots and treat those spots as “mini portals”. Doesn’t seem like you’d necessarily have to interact with the larger network at all. I think our view may be a bit skewed right now b/c of the nascent nature of the site and the fact that we’re all being funneled through fanpop.com.

Just my $.02, we’ll see how this plays out. On the whole, I’m fairly bullish though.

Let’s take some examples of spots they have on Fanpop. I’m a fan of American Idol. I’m already a member of a large American Idol community that has 10000+ members. I visit AmericanIdol.com and some Idol blogs. I’m a fan of the Boston Red Sox. I read the Boston Dirt Dogs and Sons of Sam Horn message boards. I’m a fan of Honda cars. I post on superhonda.com (115000 members). My favorite band is Coldplay. I get all the latest news on Coldplaying.com which has 24000 members. I don’t see anything here that compels me to use Fanpop instead. As Fred said, these are basically mini portals. Nothing special there. It’s almost a copy of squidoo.com or Hubpages. I see some social networking potential on this but not much real community and interactivity. And right now it looks like most of the spots are being populated with links from the management and friends. Do I need to go to the U2 spot to find links to sites I already know about? Haven’t found any decent discussions on message boards etc. Until there’s features I can’t get elsewhere this is not appealing.

I think people miss the main point of long tail plays. If you want to be a long tail play you need to really focus on that topic. You can’t throw a one size fits all solution to all topics and be successful. The most successful long tail sites are built by people who are really into that topic and know what the audience wants. I am in the adult entertainment biz and have seen this first hand. If you want to run a business selling BDSM gear you better be into that stuff. If you want to run a swinger community, you better be a swinger. The highly profitable goth erotic site Suicide Girls was built by people in that scene. I have seen so many business failures due to the founders not being in the audience they are trying to build a business around. The fanpop guys should have picked a subject that they really are into and experts in and spent time building a site completely customized for that topic. Instead they are trying to cover everything when they certainly don’t have any understanding of the needs of the fans of many of the topics.

On the legal side one other thing they should be careful about is the use of images and logos. Their celebrity, sports, company spots have pictures or logos that I doubt they have licensed….

something which is missing … and i found it missing on a lot of community websites, is the ability to search in the community for users after certain criterias. For example, I would love to be able to search fanpop for users from my country….

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