London-based WebJam, a community of openly editable personal pages, just raised $2 million from French early-stage VC I-Source Gestion. You can see our earlier coverage here.
WebJam lets you create as many personal pages as you like by using their ajax editor to drop specialized modules onto your page. It’s a little Ning and a little Netvibes or Pageflakes without the open module standards. Default pages start you off with modules for blogs, personal profiles, or personalized start pages. WebJam makes creating or modifying your own page easier by letting you to copy modules or even entire layouts from other WebJam pages to your own page with just one click.
Modules include personal publishing (blog), community (friend lists, bulletin boards…), media (photos, music, rss feeds…), and productivity tools (notepad, search, gmail…). Each of these modules can remain public, visible to friends and registered users, or kept private. Each of these pages also has a community attached to it, which you can invite other users to join. You can use this feature to emulate Ning to a degree by first creating a central group page with the community modules installed, and then inviting friends with profile page modules to join.
This is a great product, the group aspect and ability to share is great. This has alot of appeal to vertical markets allowing them to collaborate with peers.
Good to hear many new start-ups are now based in London
Thank you Nick for your post. Let me just add that while Webjam today indeed bundles the functionalities of Social Networking, Publishing and Homepage Management, one of its key features is actually the ability to replicate any of the page components.
Webjam is definitely intended from the start as an open environment where people can easily share their creations. That is already the case each time you click “+wj” on every module on the page. That means for example that any of the html modules where users have already contributed applications is replicable by default (unless the author chooses otherwise). The same is true for styles where anybody can copy, edit and share (or not) the css of the page ; and of course it also applies to content, from photos to bookmarks or map markers, unless again the page publisher decides not to share his/her information. We are now working on making this even easier, through APIs and wizards that will let people customize their experience by leveraging what is already contributed by the community.
We ultimately see ourselves as a social media eco-system where people share ideas, content and applications. Replication by default, boosted by our reputation engine (starting with pages) and our relevance algorithm (check our feeds tab for example), will allow everybody to build on what the community is doing best.
Yann Motte, CEO
Feel all free to get more info http://about.we...om/webjam/blog/
I don’t know if it applies in startups, but London in particular is loving our Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, it’s driven all kinds of IPOs to them and to Hong Kong. If we’re going to prosecute businessmen for business decisions, why would they stay?
Again, pretty sure this doesn’t apply to small startups so much, but I think London’s going to be better and better. Kudos to them for supporting business.
personally I use netvibes.
The concept reminds me a lot of Squidoo – http://www.squidoo.com – from Seth Godin. The idea of personal pages, AJAX, drag and drop modules, etc.
Seems to be a great business model / idea – And seems to have raised the right amount of money
What is the business model? Are there 1M+ users out there with time for another site to visit? Most people are still content with the “first-round SNs” and few use startup-developed homepages. Having “53K” users doesn’t exactly open the revenue opportunities, does it? No offense…
When will the “cream rise to the top” in this “round”?
Webjam has a much more involved Ajax editor than Squidoo. It allows for many more modules and adjustable column layouts. I also don’t think WebJam is meant to replace netvibes. Their personalized pages are a form of self expression, not a start page, which netvibes excels at.
Webjam just secured 2 million in next round funding, and it looks like they earned it! Great prospects!
This looks really cool, so i’m setting up my account (mac OSX, safari 2.0.4), and in the third step I got this error
:
Server Error in ‘/’ Application.
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Source Error:
So, I definitely want to check it out, but I can’t even register right now.
I will come back one more time in a few days, because it does seem like a really neat idea.
Good luck, and keep debugging!
I’m really excited that another London based company has started to do well. Good luck to them.
I get the same problem when trying to create a page:
Server Error in ‘/’ Application.
Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Etc…
So I can’t see how good/bad/easy/difficult it is. I have used Netvibes, Pageflakes and Protopage in the past and have been impressed with the strengths of each as candidates for offering launch pages. WebJam got my interest because of the blogging and community aspects that it seems to add (although I can’t seem to try them yet!)
Ah yes a shame about the error. (I got it too). I’ll give Webjam a shot another time. Always good to see European start-ups!
The bug where it was not possible to register has now been fixed.
Please be aware that Webjam is a beta application and there will be some bugs. We would be grateful if you would give Webjam another try soon!
Hi again ! first, to build on Nick’s follow-up comment, Webjam is indeed a social publishing platform that allows any user to produce, aggregate and share information. The privacy settings per page or module allow to share pages with closed communities (friends, colleagues) or simply with the entire public, like a blog. Now, if you make some of your page(s) private as many of our users do, you indeed end up with a set of personal pages – see what I do on http://www.webj...ym/myhomepages/. More and more people find it convenient to manage their set of private, community and public pages from one single account, especially as they can easily link between (some) of them through the navigation module. See how you can navigate between my sites on the example above.
Secondly like any beta version, we are still chasing some non-recurring bugs. Any issues can be reported on feedback@webjam.com.
We appreciate your understanding and feedback as we improve the service.
Yann Motte, CEO
i’ve tried Webjam and really wanted to like it, but I found the tweaking and personalizing to be very cumbersome and long-winded. Do you consider yourself a “startpage”/”homepage” per se, a la netvibes et. al. —http://snipurl.com/1dlol ?
It looks like more of the same stuff we’ve already seen.
It might be slightly better than the mentioned competitors, but it’s entering a very crowded market, that may well be saturated.
What’s jumps out at me about WebJam is not only the strength of the concept, but the quality of the design. Some sweet yinyang going on there.