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August 30, 2006

Faces.com stands apart in social networking

Marshall Kirkpatrick

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Faces.com is a social networking site from Australia with an emphasis on multimedia sharing. The site has been up for several years but has recently undergone a relaunch. Faces allows users to create their own site (like Myspace) or “widgetize” the data (photos, music, etc.) for placement on other sites.

Uploaded audio files are placed in playlists called TuneFeeds that can be shared with others or played in your profile page. There’s a browser toolbar for adding URLs to your favorites list and otherwise working with your account from off site. Desktop applications are also available for drag and drop bulk uploading and for automatically synching files from selected files with your Faces account. All the desktop apps are Windows only.

What’s most interesting about Faces, beyond its feature set, is the business model. It’s big on multimedia sharing and users are encouraged to upload a lot of pictures and music. Users seeking to exceed the monthly limits on upload (500 MB) and bandwidth (10 GB) can purchase a pro account for $25 per year. And then there are no limits to how much media you can put in your account or your visitors can play from your profile page. There will be advertising placed on profile pages and by audio in between every 4 songs played on free account user pages. The company says it will split graphic ad revenue with pro users and remove audio ads from their playlists. They say they plan on paying royalties to rights holders of the music - though I question how that’s going to happen if I’ve uploaded files myself! The offending music player is pictured here, complete with a title URL (tunefeed.com) that’s just a 404. Update: It turns out that the company is paying a licensing fee to act as a streaming internet radio station and no matter where a music file you uploaded to your profile comes from, they count each time anyone plays it as an instance of that license being used. They are also working on adding a music store that will let listeners purchase songs through Faces.

The seven person company has received a little over $2 million US dollars in private funding to date. Initial funding plus pro accounts plus graphic and audio advertising are where the money is coming from.

Photo editing and mobile upload are said to be pending, both of which would be very cool.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Startups.in/India

    August 30th, 2006 at 4:22 pm

    I think I just read somewhere earlier today an article/post that suggests individuals to launch startups where there aren’t already 50 other competing services in that space or to launch one with a feature set that is very unique.
    Now, I’m wondering what sets face.com apart from other similar services? Ofcourse, I like the name face.com :)

    Nag .B

  2. Skip Trace

    August 30th, 2006 at 4:32 pm

    As these social networking sites get more and more popular and add more advanced features, they make excellent sites for doing people searches and background research on individuals. Law enforcement professionals as well as legal and government agencies are already using the sites for background research and employers are starting to use them for pre employment screening.

  3. pete

    August 30th, 2006 at 4:45 pm

    I dunno, when I was faces.com, I thought it said faeces.com

    :/

  4. Patrick

    August 30th, 2006 at 4:48 pm

    It looks like they are using YouTube’s strategy for patent infringement. Put up illegal MP3’s? That’s the copyright holder’s problem. If this ever becomes successful, expect a call from the RIAA.

  5. Paul Stamatiou

    August 30th, 2006 at 4:49 pm

    One thing’s for sure.. if they want to get anywhere, they’ll have to redesign. That is the worst of Web 2.0 wrapped into one site.

  6. Ron Silverman

    August 30th, 2006 at 4:52 pm

    Can this business model gain enough traction to make some bucks?

  7. danny

    August 30th, 2006 at 5:00 pm

    LOL…same here…i thought it said ‘feces.com”

  8. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 30th, 2006 at 5:03 pm

    Well it doesn’t. It says faces.com, lol :(

  9. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 30th, 2006 at 5:15 pm

    Update: It turns out that the company is paying a licensing fee to act as a streaming internet radio station and no matter where a music file you uploaded to your profile comes from, they count each time anyone plays it as an instance of that license being used. They are also working on adding a music store that will let listeners purchase songs through Faces. That’s very interesting.

  10. Sal

    August 30th, 2006 at 5:44 pm

    Again, like most web 2.zero companies, nothing substantial, and definitely nothing sustainable.
    And the long feature list - that’s just means they will have no real identity. Combining everything everyone is doing isn’t really a winning strategy imho. The learning curve will be too much for your average user, making them leave before trying the site out. Just my 2 cents prediction on this.

  11. Startups.in/India

    August 30th, 2006 at 5:49 pm

    “..thought faeces/feces..”..yuck, you folks are sick ;-) lol

  12. Doubtful

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:00 pm

    It’s true that the name is quite a poor choice. You mentionned this was a previously existing network?

    Asides from the lousy name, I fail to see anything innovative here.

    As the previous users mentionned, the design seems quite poor, and the feature set doesn’t strike as “new”.

    Other startups such as TagWorld or UthTV (or FileMobile, or Eefoof, and maybe even Goowy now) already allow people to share their media. UthTV also pays its most active users.

    What is so “impressive” and “crazy” about this site?
    What are these “too many features”?

    I don’t understand why this site gets different treatment in its reviews compared with the sites I mentionned earlier.

  13. Jonathan

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:10 pm

    Hi All,

    Startups.in/India: I think Tunefeed sets Faces apart, together with the ability to host multiple facets of users digital life in one place. Our drag and drop upload tool for example allows you to drag any photo or MP3 onto it, [video etc coming soon] - ultimately there are fewer places for my friends to visit if they want to see my stuff.

    Hmmm, faeces.com - not sure that logo would be as bright and shiny as ours…! :-)

    Paul - not sure what you’d like to see removed/redesigned?

    Patrick - your comment might have been before Marshall updated with the information about royalties? Video is way different to music - look at any internet radio station - they all pay royalties, supported by advertising.

    Ron and Sal - time will tell, but we think we have chosen a good path!

    Doubtful – I don’t see any other sites allowing you to upload MP3’s and creating play lists from them? I think it is a good choice of name too, since most everyone has a face on the front of their head, and we are trying to help people display their digital face to the world :-)

  14. Startups.in/India

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:25 pm

    Nice to hear it from you Jonathan. Thanks for the clarifications. You probably are right with its USPs and the site might as well do very well in Australia if you’ve the first movers advantage. But I still would question how difficult would it be for globally well established social networking sites to implement any of these features that they might be missing at this time.

    Nag .B

  15. Doubtful

    August 30th, 2006 at 6:56 pm

    Hey Jonathan,
    Thanks for replying so fast!

    Here is a list of sites which allow to upload mp3’s and create playlists from them, as requested:
    http://mp3tunes.com/
    http://www.radioblogclub.com/
    http://www.streampad.com/

  16. DaveU

    August 30th, 2006 at 7:24 pm

    ranked 371,214 on alexa with a flat traffic line, i don’t see anything crazy…

  17. Phoenix

    August 31st, 2006 at 12:36 am

    A very interesting site no doubt. I was blown over by the intuitive addition of various components. Yet socializing itself seems very hard because I cannot see many faces in there except my own. Everyone is hiding huh? :|

  18. Jonathan

    August 31st, 2006 at 2:08 am

    Startups.in/India - I guess time will tell :-)

    Doubtful - mp3tunes doesn’t allow you to stream music to friends, radioblogclub doesn’t make things very clear from their home page and I for one am not about to download an application to find out? [I'll take your word for it though; I had not seen it before!] And finally streampad is in beta testing and not available to me at least. However I do take your point, there are other sites out there, I will no doubt hear about more of them in due course :-)

    DaveU - we all gotta start someplace!

    Pheonix - totally agree, and we have more features on the way - particularly groups and more exploration features for most pages.

    Thanks for the input people :-)

  19. additional_input

    August 31st, 2006 at 5:03 am

    * please re-examine how smooth common social interactions are on faces vs myspace
    * no one in real life who isn’t a huge fucking dork cares about tags or rss
    * the gradients, reflections, shadows and borders are ridiculously overdone
    * even simple stuff like (from someone’s profile):

    About me: (Private)
    Meeting people for: (not supplied)

    WHY ARE YOU EVEN SHOWING THESE PROFILE ATTRIBUTES TO ME IF THEY ARE PRIVATE OR EMPTY?

    * there’s apparently no way to view people’s pictures other than as annoying slideshows which have awful ui
    * no one in the world will find the links to 12 different social bookmarking sites useful

  20. Jason Kolb

    August 31st, 2006 at 5:30 am

    Trying to squish as many features as possible into a product is NOT the way to topple a market leader, it just creates a confusing interface. I highly doubt that anyone will be able to overtake MySpace in the current generation of social networking apps, they just have too much momentum. The NEXT generation, however, now that’s a different story….

  21. james

    August 31st, 2006 at 12:47 pm

    got to agree. it’s hard to better someone already dominant and doing a ’sufficiently good’ job, even if the replacement is better - DVORAK syndrome. However, inventing something ‘beyond’ social networking would be interesting. the market is too crowded with faeces - sorry faces.

  22. mike

    September 1st, 2006 at 12:28 pm

    How does a streaming radio licensing arrangement make the free streaming distribution of mp3s legal? There are so many restrictions associated with online streaming licenses e.g. the number of times a song can be played within a timeframe, restrictions on letting people select what song should be played when, etc. that don’t seem to be addressed. Maybe the rules are different in australia but i doubt that a similar license would fly with the RIAA here.

  23. Jonathan, Free MP3 Sharing

    September 2nd, 2006 at 11:40 pm

    Mike - you are right, there are a lot of rules to follow. All the restrictions of the DMCA are built into the playing mechanism of the tunefeeds.

    I’ve taken the other points on board… thanks

  24. Meshach

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:25 am

    Does TechCrunch no longer believe in the “full disclosure” policy? Faces.com is paying $10k a month to techCrunch for sponsorship. How about some fair play? I know I’ve seen you guys make it clear when you review a site that brings you money, but this one’s kinda sad. You have a whole list of people talking about how unoriginal and boring and poorly designed, and poorly named the site is, but all the info on techCrunch is like it’s the answer to myspace…

    I love this site, I don’t mean disrespect in anyway. I agree with most of the comments here. It’s too bulky from a UI standpoint, which made me not want to do anything more with it. Read “GetReal” by 37signals.com.

    Start with No.

  25. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:29 am

    Meshach, I actually wrote this post prior to the ad appearing and was surprised to see it! I blog here but am not in the ad sales department - thank goodness.

  26. Shannon Clark

    September 6th, 2006 at 5:48 pm

    A suggestion, perhaps when a new advertiser kicks in you should retroactively edit any posts on that advertiser with a disclosure blurb (at the top of the post would be my suggestion).

    Something like:

    [Faces.com signed a sponsorship agreement with techcrunch as of MM/DD/YEAR which was AFTER this article was written]

    And edit it again when the sponsorship ends - so that the updated note would have the sponsorship START and END dates.

    And yes, this could have the effect of reediting those posts (and thus having feedreaders re-pull them down for some readers) which would be a small and real benefit for the sponsors, as well as help serve full disclosure interests for all of your readers.

    Probably this should be an automated/semi-automated function of the ad-sales department, so the update post would be separate from the editorial content.

    Shannon

  27. Fred

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:34 pm

    Jonathan,

    Give that you have to pay a small amount everytime a song is played, how are you planning to make money from this? Does the PRO account make up for this alone?

    / Fred

  28. Fred

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:38 pm

    Also, I forgot to ask, how can you determine which song is played if there are no meta tags in the mp3 headers?

    / Fred (again)

  29. Jonathan

    September 7th, 2006 at 3:30 pm

    Fred,

    The pro accounts help with revenue but do not fully compensate. We will eventually have audio advertising within the tunefeeds and we’ll share revenue with feed owners.

    Absent meta tags have been a very small problem to date.

  30. Sam Alex

    September 22nd, 2006 at 12:31 pm

    Learning how to use the site is not so plain.

    I want to know how to do the site making in simple language. thanks so much

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