We are three months late but the first release of our new site is now live on http://hub.spoke.com. We have released this first version of hub to members last week and we are now preparing ourselves to open it to the public towards the end of next week. You can find some great member-profile examples that we caught on Twitter here: http://storify.com/philippe_cases/spoke-launch.
Hub.spoke has the one feature you have been asking for for a long time--the ability to update information directly on site without registering. Since we released the site to our members last week, we’ve had thousands of unique visitors and the average number of edits per visit was 7.7 edits. The average time spent on site was close to 7 minutes and the bounce rate was 25%. 62% of the edits were on people and 38% were on companies. 20% of those visits were made by people who came at least three times. Those statistics are promising in terms of engagement and we look forward to seeing how these metrics evolve when the site is truly public.
Right now, anybody can edit any profile and edits go live after moderation. We have monitored the quality of edits during this initial test with our members and the results were outstanding as we didn’t have one piece of spam or wrong information. As we are opening our site to the public and we are looking to have only good quality information on the site, we will be very cautious on moderation and the jury is still be out to decide whether we will require some level of authentication (such as registering with a real account on Facebook) or if we keep editing open for anonymous users.
This new release is full of features but the one other feature that I am most excited about is the ability to organize links available about a topic on the web. Think of it as your dream Google search results on a person or a company you are searching. All the relevant links are there and organized in a coherent way that makes sense. We are providing two different frameworks to organize links: one is a timeline called milestones for companies or achievements for people where you can select links to create a historic view about yourself and your friends and their companies, and the other is notable links if the link is important enough to help understand the company. Here are few examples of companies with great milestones and notable links: Tesla Motors and Shoedazzle ; and here are some great examples for people, Ben Smith and Indra Nooyi.
One more thing: if you are an expert, consultant, or blogger looking for a job, or an active participant in an industry, and you are looking for ways to reach more people beyond your traditional network, create or edit profile pages on companies, or important people in your industries on Spoke. Any links will be credited to you on the profile page so your name will be viewed thousands of times by people who are searching for those profiles. Of course this feature is available only if you are registered. As we are moving forward, we will keep all this information so that we can promote you even more in the coming months, if you are an active participant on Spoke. You could even become an editor if you consistently provide good links. So do no wait to engage and get known in your industry.
PS: For those of you who wonders what is gonna with Spoke.com, www.spoke.com and hub.spoke.com are going to stay separate until hub.spoke.com has caught up in terms of functionality with spoke.com and then we will switch.
