Gossip is big business.
Although some of us will be less than keen to admit it, we all love a bit of a gossip. Regardless of whether it is about friends, family, or celebrities – when a bit of juicy news comes along we find it almost impossible to keep to ourselves. In the digital age, most of our gossip comes directly from our social media feeds, with friends going through marriage break-ups and posting drunken ramblings seemingly every day. With Facebook, Twitter and Google+, we certainly don’t have to look far to find gossip – the biggest problem is keeping up with it all across each of the social networks.
Enter The Taploid, a new web app that runs natural language processing on your social media and uses the information to present you with your very own tabloid, detailing your friends’ lives.
“Think of The Taploid as Perez Hilton if you were a social media expert with all the time in the world to sort through all your friend’s posts, interpret them, and deliver them back to you,” said co-founder, serial entrepreneur and former VP of Business Development at Skout.com, Redg Snodgrass to VentureBeat.
According to VentureBeat, The Taploid already has over 2,500 users and has profiled over 700,000 users from other social media services. Initially the service will only run on Facebook, although plans are already in place for The Taploid to start digesting data from Twitter and Foursquare.
By logging in to The Taploid using your Facebook account, you will be provided with a full page magazine full of gossip, silly stories and various interactions – all very similar to what you would see on a supermarket shelf or online publication.
Making money
The Taploid will certainly appeal to younger social media users and is fun to use, but will it make any money? Well Snodgrass believes so. The co-founder thinks that data talking about shopping and kids all the time will be valuable to big brands. There will also be the opportunity to sell promotions to get people liking and following pages on Facebook and Twitter. For internet marketers that are looking to embrace social media in all its forms, the prospect of promotion on The Taploid will be very appealing.
Some will find The Taploid to be completely hilarious; others may see it as somewhat creepy. One thing is for sure though; with the gossip magazine market valued at a reported $85 billion (£52.8 billion), Snodgrass and Scott’s start up definitely makes sense.
