The concept of social discovery is nothing new. In fact, it was at

the heart of the beginnings of social media as dating sites latched onto

the idea of meeting new people as the core of their operations and

services. Today, online dating

is just as big as it’s ever been but social, but people are looking

more towards social media to find new things that go beyond love.

While most have heard of Pinterest,

few realize that one of the things that makes it successful in a world

where Facebook and Twitter have dominated for years is the discovery

component. On Facebook, we get to see interesting content that our

friends post, but we don’t get to see much of what the rest of the world

shares. It’s possible for a friend of a friend to share something

interesting, then our own Facebook friend shares it to us, but it’s not

nearly at the level of Pinterest.

The concept behind Pinterest is

about sharing what we find rather than sharing what we’re doing. Some of

the people we follow on Pinterest do nothing other than share what they

find on their friends’ Pinterest boards or on the popular section and

therefore it gets transmitted into our view. While Facebook has

networking cornered and Twitter has news well under wraps, we often

don’t get to see highly-interesting visuals depicted on our walls.

Pinterest does that for us which is why it is growing so fast. Its biggest challenge with such growth: avoiding the Pinterest marketing spammers.

Another social discover

site is Tagged. Started at the same time as Facebook, Tagged pivoted

early on, recognizing as early as 2007 that Facebook would eventually

win the social networking fight (even though Facebook was only at 60

million users at the time compared to 250 million for MySpace). They

already had a strong user base but because pure social networking is

about friends and family also being on it, there was really only room

for the most popular choice (as Google+ is finding out).

Their

pivot took them into a realm that allowed them to co-exist with

Facebook. If Mark Zuckerberg wanted to connect friends and family,

Tagged would be the place to make new friends (and get away from

family). Their form of social discovery hovered around the getting the people who wanted a freshness-alternative to the ones we see every day on Facebook. Getting the “leftovers” from Facebook has been lucrative; Tagged has over 100 million users and has been profitable for 4 years.

One of the older social discovery sites that has never truly been challenged is StumbleUpon. The concept of discovery is taken to the next level with SU as users have literally no idea what piece of content they’ll be served next. Through their toolbar, users stumble from page to page based upon their interest and history. They can thumb up or thumb down pages that are served to them and over time the algorithm learns the preferences of the user.