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Plinky launches in public beta today. The whimsically named online content creation service is co-founded by Simeon Simeonov, technology partner at Waltham-based Polaris Venture Partners, and Blogspot and Google Reader developer Jason Shellen.
Where most Internet players are focused on helping users fish for high-quality content, Lafayette, Calif.-based Plinky Inc. approaches the web from the opposite end of an information transaction. The website is designed to help users add high-quality content to the vast ocean of online material already in existence.
Plinky.com starts with a question, a la Twitter’s “What are you doing?”, but more involved. “It could be, tell us about three songs you’d like to put on a mix tape, or what’s the most bizzarre gift you’ve ever received,” Shellen said. As users write responses, the application asks follow-up questions. When all the questions are answered, the application weaves together a blog post from the answers, adding content like maps and images pulled from across the web.
“I don’t know how many times I heard people who said ‘well, it was easy enough to create the blog, but I really don’t know what I would write about’,” said Shellen, who worked on Google’s 2003 acquisition of Pyra Labs and its Blogspot blogging engine, and later helped develop Google Reader, an online RSS aggregation and sharing platform. Shellen said Plinky seeks to solve the problem of encouragement, and make it easier for typical web users to add bells and whistles that make unadorned copy compelling.
Simeonov has been working on a related problem — how such a project can make money. Plinky has raised $1.6 million from Polaris, as well as angel investors Jeff Clavier and Mike Jones. Mike Hirshland represents Polaris on the board.
“The best way to monetize user-generated content is to think about monetization before the content got created,” he said. Content can be easily found on the web, and it can be monetized with strategies like search engine optimization, targeted ads or buy buttons, but only if metadata like locations, song titles, products and product attributes can be extracted, he explained. “Monetization is a metadata problem. When the metadata is in a block of text, you have to get it out.”
Getting such data out from inside a block of text is difficult without a lot of fuzziness and errors, he said. Plinky solves that problem by isolating that information before it gets swirled together in a blog post.
Simeonov, who has helped launch three other companies with Polaris backing, began working on the project with Shellen in the fall of 2007, spending days at a time on the West Coast developing the technology and business model for the project, which Shellen conceived after leaving his position as an acquisitions manager at Google that August.
Right now, Plinky hopes to attract a community of users large enough to make its landing page engaging. For example, they hope to aggregate contributed content in cool ways, Shellen said. “On days when we ask a mapping question, we can put pins on a map and say here are the 10 most talked-about places on Plinky. There’s the discrete piece that publishes out and then there’s the piece in aggregate that’s fun to be part of.”
Plinky is pre-revenue at this point, and Simeonov’s role has dialed down to one day a week. For now, the company’s founders get to do the fun part, he said.
“Our job is to - for a whole new wave of people - make it easy and fun for them to express themselves and to allow the people who actually see their expressions, who don’t have to be their buddies and friends, but even strangers, to look at them and say wow that’s a piece of content that‘s important to me and meaningful to me and valuable to me,” Simeonov said. “That’s a thing to feel good about.”
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