TagWorld, the social networking site that launched in late 2005, has been the subject of a lot of speculation lately. Valleywag speculated that the company was in trouble and pointed out that the management page (cache here) had been removed. Others have noted that TagWorld’s Comscore numbers have dropped significantly from earlier in 2006. At the very least, the company has made little headway against MySpace and the others.
But there are other rumors as well. Viacom and NBC are still figuring out their social networking strategies (NBC is doing so publicly), and insiders are saying that Viacom will likely announce an investment and/or partnership deal with TagWorld in the near future. It’s likely that TagWorld’s engine will be the back end to the much anticipated MTV social network. TagWorld won’t comment on the story, other than to say that they remain healthy and will be launching a new version soon.
TagWorld previously raised $7.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, in March 2006.
if the potential investors do their due diligence, they find that evan and freddie and not exactly the most upstanding biz partners.
i worked with both of them years ago at iwin.com and trafficmarketplace
freddie pilaged iwin.com before he left, and the tmp biz that evan ran was pretty slimy.
A lot of money is being dumped into social networking right now by the big media companies - and I think most of it is going to be wasted. Who wants to have so many profiles? Yet right now we are forced to have multiple profiles. They need to create an integration API that will allow a membership system across sites. Making friends with their business enemies.
This is just stupid to invest big in. Social networking is now officially easy; there are what like 1000 of these firms in China? Trying to sell ‘backend’ social networking technology is like selling air.
Viacom should take a $5M option to buy the company, lock the founders into a one year employment agreement and see where it ends up next year. They, not the entrrepreneur, have all the leverage.
I had an idea few years ago that would integrate such API across all sites, not only social community, it is kinda easy and would ease our pain by far.
But again, the integration would be a pain, knowing that most of the sites wouldnt allow such outside integration.
It’s a matter of where everyone is. Right now, people use myspace because all of their friends are on it. With all of the serious serious spam issues that are going on right now over there (which amazingly nobody is talking about), I think people are going to jump ship. Jumping ship is only going to happen once in a blue moon so who will be the safe haven? I don’t think it’s facebook. Is it tagworld? Don’t know. It seems easy enough to use, time will tell.
Wow — take a quick look at the Compete chart for Tagworld.com:
http://snapshot.compete.com/tagworld.com?int=1032
Month Δ: -39.1%
Year Δ: -88.8%
@1.sakki: temporary business was “slimy”. Details please?
some of the key people at tmp, at least in the early days, took too much $$ for themselves….freddie did that at iwin.com as well right as they got bought out by uproar.com back in 2001.
tmp basically invented pop-under ads, and several sites were able to use pop-unders to inflate their media metrix numbers (now comscore), which isn’t a crime in itself…… but tmp’s customers also had many complaints about the stats and results from their ad buys but tmp always turned a deaf ear.
it’s pretty well known that these two guys are fairly slimy, especially freddie. i would never do a deal with these guys.
tmp = trafficmarketplace.com
tmp and iwin are now owned by vendarmedia…don’t know anything about them.
I’ve heard this social interoperability thing a lot lately, but what priority should it be? These companies can barely stay afloat as it is, and why would the stable ones make their competitors more competitive?
I just don’t get why this would even be thought of as a reasonable request.
I haven’t found the GMail command to export all mail to Yahoo yet either. Go figure.
something tells me sakki was a low-level iwin employee who was a little upset when his 500 options didn’t make him a multimillionaire. what exactly does “took too much $$ for themselves” mean?
Can someone explain why Tagworld is innovative?
orton, i never worked for iwin or tmp, i was part of the team from uproar.com that acquired iwin and tmp.
ok, so what does “took too much $$ for themselves” mean?
My impression is that they were buying most of their traffic; not much is organic. Why would Viacom want to partner with TagWorld when they could just buy traffic on their own?
The guys at Tagworld focused a bit more on the music side of things when they launched to go up against MySpace. From there, I am not sure how they evolved or what the next direction was.
In regards to these guys being “slimy”, I worked directly with iwin, tmp, uproar, etc. If these guys were slimy, it was because it was 2001-2002 and everything/everyone was slimy and that is how businesses stay in business. Know your history….or, act like you have been there before! Can’t argue with guys that know how to generate revenue starting up a company in a HIGH growth area. after a few years, maybe their product hasn’t taken hold like they expected. Since we are comparing and contrasting right now, compare the actions of iwin/tmp with that of eUniverse/knowledge base.
Today, these groups are known as Tagworld and MySpace. If you want to out a further list of names, we can do that too….
Good luck to the Tagworld guys. Maybe this is a move they needed. Or, maybe its the last gasp of air…..Time will tell.
http://www.demo.com/demonstrat...../63036.php
very innovative imo.
Interesting story. As part of our product development we have accounts tagworld.com and all the others. I like some of their ideas, although think their brand name is not so good. Maybe Viacom can take the technology a launch a re-branded website, then promote it and grow it big. Good luck!
-Chris Comella, Founder
BuzzPal - The World Is Your Party
http://www.buzzpal.com
Chris we had the same idea!
So Tagworld is going over to MTV. Hmmm…I always wondered how MySpace and other social sites that have huge music proponents affect MTV’s traffic? Anybody know?
Adam
Adam -
MTV is about anything BUT music these days. They devote about one hour each to showing ‘clips’ of top videos with the majority of that segment going to interviewing guest celebrities and giving away shit to the audience. The rest of the network is all about garbage shows like Laguna Beach and Yo Mamma. If anything, MTV is looking for a cool factor to add to their network, not music.
-Nick
http://adgridwork.com
I briefly worked at Skilljam.com when they had some ex iwin employees who had worked with these guys in the past. They said the same thing, that they were startup pillagers and snake oil salesmen.
i’d be curious to hear if there’s ever a final press release with the details of the deal. sounds to me tagworld squeaked out a hail mary deal, and given that its within a year of their round, its most likely a hail mary deal for the vcs.
the management are a group of operators, slapping assets together and pushing marketable metrics with the hope of convincing uneducated buyers they’re selling something else, looking for a quick trade. no law against that, but you definitely can’t call them businessmen, in either 1999 or 2007.
Yeah i think if U join any of these big social networks like MySpace or Flickr or Facebook yer basically gonna continue to hang with yer friendz* U might like the other coffee shop better but if all yer friendz are going to Starbucks thass prolly where u’ll grab yer next caffeine buzz! ;))
MySpace certainly has the Music crowd & the kidz but it’s certainly no 2.0W Hotel - clunky & annoying navigation - if anything i give credit to the inhabitants there who’ve spruced up the neighbourhood & made their pages look & sound pretty cool*
Dear Viacom,
Dumbest idea ever. Buy Facebook instead.
Yours, Paul.
Facebook! Are you serious? What a crap site! Try socialise.biz easy to use and doesnt take all your bandwidth to load. Plus it’s monitored well and the owners actually ‘manage’ it unlike so many other sites.