The first two companies to present at this afternoon’s Vertical Social Networking session proved that niche social networks can be exciting, even for people outside of their respective niches.
On paper, a social network for bird watchers sounds like a joke. But the founders of Birdpost wowed the TechCrunch50 audience by presenting not only a very well-designed site but one that thoroughly addressed a real problem for certain people, that of locating rare birds. Like Wikipedia, Birdpost intends to unleash knowledge traditionally locked up in the heads of a small group of experts. While in the case of bird watching the group is highly focused, the founders insist that 45 million Americans would actually be interested in their knowledge.
Birdpost provides knowledge about birds and, in particular, where they’ve been spotted, in three main ways. First, an interactive map based on Google Maps shows pins where birds have been spotted by the site’s members. When you click on a pin, it shows a picture of the bird and other information. Secondly, members can compile lists of the birds they wish to spot, and when someone spots any one of those birds, a notification will get sent out. And finally, members can search for birds by name, characteristics, and regions.
The founders say that Birdpost has already archived all 9,600 species of birds in the world, many of them with their peculiar characteristics (”red hair”) and known territory. They plan to branch out soon into other types of animals, such as fish and insects, eventually creating an animal search engine of sorts.
Click here to watch a demo of Birdpost.
Closet Couture, the vertical social network that presented right after Birdpost, also brings to the web a type of information ordinarily held privately by individuals. In Closet Couture’s case, it’s the clothing you keep in your closet. Marketed to wealthy women, the site lets members upload pictures of their clothes and plan their daily outfits with a 2D modeling tool. Profiles list your wardrobe for others who are looking for ideas on how to dress more fashionably. And a packing list feature helps members plan their traveling outfits.
Closet Couture is a marketplace in addition to a social network, for both clothing and stylists. Members have online access to personal stylists who can be hired for one-off projects ($25 to plan today’s outfit, $350 to plan the whole month, etc). These stylist can help you pick outfits from your existing wardrobe; they can also help you pick from a collection of clothes provided by retailers that have partnered with the site.
love the title
I must say with all respect to the guys of birdpost, I found the site very frustrating. Difficult to navigate, too busy and essentially the social aspect is covered off by facebook etc, and not nearly as well.
Shame, I had great expectations from this site…
Seems like the style sheet is all messed up on birdpost.com.
Birders take their winged beats pretty serious like. There’s a market there, I’d say.
Woops. Meant to say “beasts”! Not sure what a “winged beat” is, though it has a nice ring to it.
Very cool service, but I skeptical about the “$32B” market claim, as described, for the bird watching market. For example, if I buy a camera, that I could use for Birds, I could also a Camera for snapping cars as well, but the sale of that Camera is part of the photography market, not the bird watching hobby. I agree with the presenter that said they have a good technology that can be used in other areas of interest. For example I could see BirdPost quickly reskinned to service the needs of Car-Parazzi.com, an exotic car sighting hobby site.
A top down approach is the most common but at the same time least convincing way to size a market.
$32 billion is a huge number but it’s the wrong number when you plan on having a freemium based business model where the user pays $50 for access to certain parts of the site (that’s the model they were thinking of).
So if you want to use a top down approach and 45 million people are interested in this kind of knowledge, and they all pay $50 a year then the size of the market is actually $2 billion.
But it’s not realistic. It might be good for PR but when you talk to your advisory board or business partners you will / should be using a bottom up approach.
I think both dogster.com and smugmug.com are the benchmarks they should be looking at.
Don’t know… they are defiantly not getting anything from New York, there are hardly any pigeons. Forget about anything else.
People spend 3x as much on bird watching as on movies?! Yeah, I’m not sure I buy that either…
birdpost - probably the most innovative idea to come out of the conference, with massive potential to scale this technology to other markets.
In terms of the market - even if it were only $10B, still a large market.
Mark, you are hitting a new low with your title here. How come every other company gets their own post but Closet Couture gets relegated to a “birds” post? Not so nice.
Your guys are definitely not playing nice and fair. Where’s your professionalism?
Closet Couture looks like a beautiful product, like it’d literally inspire one to be more fashionable ;). Look forward to checking it out.
I do see a fairly significant hurdle with what seems to be core to the service…getting busy (and wealthy?) women to actually take photos of all their clothes (or even any) and putting them online. That’s hours of work. Never mind users also need to tag the photos, get the clothing in the right position to look correct on the “model” when it’s on the site, etc.
May need to make this whole experience a bit more bite-sized for users and ensure they feel like they’re “winners” early in the engagement cycle with the site (i.e., that I’m not wasting my time and am either creating something beautiful/useful &/or am getting positive feedback from the community in some way).
It’ll be interesting to see if the site evolves to more of a youth oriented site where one can get friends to help “style” or suggest clothing/accessories for you to purchase based on the ability to see into your closet.
Nancy, Closet Couture already has features like sharing your closets with friends so that they can recommend/help you create outfits with what you already have or suggest clothing/accessories that you may been to purchase.
Sign up as a BETA user here:
http://www.closetcouture.com/techcrunch
Birdpost is a blatant rip-off of the NONPROFIT eBird project that has been around for years.
Much of the Birdpost application seems to be a repackaging of some of eBird’s new features like Google Maps, Notable Birds Gadget, etc.
They obviously used existing eBird features as the kernel, added a few social networking ‘bells and whistles’ (which birders won’t care about) and voila.
And unlike eBird, Birdpost is of zero value to bird researchers and conservationists, since Birdpost data is very poorly screened for misidentifications, spurious reports and “nut job” birders compared to eBird and other real citizen-science projects.
I urge birders to use eBird instead - after all, it not only lets you record, track, map, search, alerts, etc. - but it also helps conserve the birds we care about.
Birdpost is a for-profit ripoff of an existing nonprofit product.
For Shame!
Jim Smith is right. Why would anyone pay for something in Birdpost that they can get for free in eBird? Plus eBird has actual scientific value, an appeal that cannot be understated when talking about birders.
Something smells here.
I think what smells is ebird is nervous about having competition. I’ve looked at both sites and birdpost appears easier to use and perhaps geared towards maps and pictures more than ebird.
I just went to the Birdpost site and I’m amazed at the visual ability to track your bird sitings. I can’t wait to upload my excel life list to their site. I’ve tried to use eBird before and it is totally unintuitive. I give them props for trying to go the non-profit route but that doesn’t mean the usablity is there. I would be totally willing to pay for Birdpost simply for the ability to have my life list of birds in a cool presentation. I’m sold!
They’re not the only people working on this. Game on gentlemen!