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Searchles goes for another angel funding round
By Vivek | February 8th, 2007 at 09:11 pm ET
Searchles the social bookmarking and search platform today announced that it has raised more angel funding. Besides the existing angel investors, Mark Walsh participated in the funding round. Mark was a member of the board of Blackboard Inc. and and served as president and CEO, and later as chairman, of VerticalNet, the first publicly traded business-to-business Internet company.
Searchles is basically trying to take social bookmaking to a new level by enabling easier sharing, and networking around the content saved by the users. Searchles is working on building relevancy around bookmarks to build list of related people, and groups by analyzing your bookmarks and tags. I can’t comment on the relevancy since I haven’t really used it personally.
Keeping up with the feature addition momentum, Searchles introduced bunch of features today that makes its Groups feature more robust including controls around participation, and management dashboards. Also taking a cue from Digg, Searchles has added “top groups” and “top people” lists to the front page. Obviously account activity, quality and relevancy of posts, and size of the network will govern who gets pushed to the front page. In my PoV, groups in the Top Group lists get to remain on the top longer ’cause of their presence on the front page getting them more traffic. As a downside they can be easy targets for spam bookmarks that can destroy the community effect. Someone has to be always watching out for what gets added to a group, which won’t be an easy task for high traffic groups. Still, Searchles team is putting in lot of effort in a saturated market where some of the startups(like Bluedot) are already feeling the heat.
Links:
Searchles
on February 8th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Hello there StartupSquad, thanks for the writeup!
The main reason for the new features launch was to give our users much more control over groups and keep them from being overrun with spam. Group owners now have the ability to control who contributes to their groups, and also to remove spam or irrelevant content. Those top groups will only remain at the top if the owners continue to keep them filled with good content, if they let the spammers in then the quality will go downhill and the people will find a better group to be a part of.
As a group increases in traffic, the owner can also promote other members to managerial positions to help control the content. This is a user-generated site, we want the users to be in control as much as possible. We think with a combination of algorithms and human intuition we can continue to evolve our groups so spam does not become a problem that degrades the quality of the site.
many thanks
dumbfounder
on March 8th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
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