As we are starting 2013, I wanted to share with you some of
the achievements we have been able to reach in 2012 and thank you for all your
help along the way. I also want to wish you a happy new year from all of us at Spoke.com, we are all looking forward to be of
help to you in 2013.
2012 has been the year of our relaunch. We released our
alpha platform in January, and our beta back in June. The goal of this launch
was to encourage contribution, as well as to gauge potential business cases for
the platform. We did better than we expected as we finished the year being
named as a top business intelligence
company, and attracting over 25,000 new registered users!
Back in November, we cleared 200,000 edits made to the site by
more than 25,000 unique people. About half of the edits accepted in moderation were
made anonymously, which tends to validate our initial choice to allow them. We are seeing a fair amount of spam, but it is
well taken care of by our moderation system.
The pace of contribution has increased by a factor of 2.5
between January and November. Across the
board, our contribution metrics are half of what Wikipedia’s were when
Wikipedia had the same amount of monthly visits, but accelerating (see below graph)
Our goal for 2013 is to be even closer, and hopefully reach the same level of performance. We think we can achieve it as more media companies start to get involved with the site, either through direct contribution, or through our APIs.
Speaking of which, yes we have been actively building APIs
in collaboration with a handful of new partners. We have two sets of API in the
works, one for reading from our database (read only) and the other to allow
contributions (read and write) from our partners directly into the database. Cloudbase3, started by former CNET and
Yahoo! executive Patrick
Houston is already live using
our Read Only API. Please let us
know if you would like to participate in this program.
In 2012, from a business use standpoint, we saw three very
distinct use cases.
Manage your digital presence: Right away, users started to leverage
the platform to promote themselves. The majority of the usage has been in creating
and updating the ‘general info’ and ‘people’ page sections while the most
advanced users were taking advantage of links and videos to aggregate all of their
available internet content. By doing so, they were able to create much richer
and relevant pages and better understand their social media footprint. Between
companies and people, we had more than 160,000 pages created on the platform in
2012.
Business Intelligence: In Q4, we launched a customized activity stream for our registered users so that they are alerted via email when one of the pages is updated with a newly issued press release, a newly hired executive, or when an interesting and relevant article has been written about their subjects of interest. Right now, we have more than 50,000 different companies, people and topics being followed at any given point, and are sending 30,000 emails on a monthly basis.
Subject Matter Expertise: A few people have built more than a thousand topics
to display their level of knowledge and share that knowledge with their network
and new information seekers. It is very exciting to see those interesting
topics being created on the platform, and adoption is growing.
For 2013, our plate is already full so stay tuned for more
exciting news. We will advance all of our use cases one by one, and create mountains
of interesting new content both from us and with our partners.
Again, we wish you all the best for 2013 and let us know if we can help you in any way.
Philippe Cases
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