Friday October 17, 2014

• Summary: More positive press for Pinterest; and the sad coda for two once-hot startups of 2011 that lost their way:Twitpic will shut down, and 2011 darling Tagged has officially shelved IPO plans and changed its name and business model

• Twitpic will shut down on October 25th: Twitpic started as one of the only ways to share photos on Twitter, allowing users to upload pics and get a URL they could post. It filled the permalinked photo pages with ads to  But then in mid-2011, Twitter revealed it would launch its own photo-hosting service, making Twitpic largely unnecessary. Despite claiming it had found an acquirer to save it from death following a trademark complaint from Twitter, the photo sharing service today announced that didn’t happen and it’s game over on October 25th. Users can now export their photos until the 25th, at which point they’ll vanish into the void.

• Social networking site Tagged is no longer going for an IPO. Instead it’s renamed itself if(we), acquired little known messaging app startup Tinode for an undisclosed amount and has completely changed direction to become a social app incubator. If(we) is essentially a brand new company, now acting as a parent brand to Tagged and social gaming site Hi5. Tagged was on a high growth course for a number of years and the money had been rolling in. According to some accounts, revenue was up 30 percent year-over-year. We reported the site was projected to grow to $45 million in revenue back in 2011. The company founders were reportedly aiming for a $1 billion IPO. Then everything shifted away from Facebook gaming and desktop sites to mobile. This is when both users and revenue began to drop off, according to sources. Co-founders Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith tried at first to shift into going mobile first, but that didn’t seem to work either. Revenue slid from $57 million last year to a projected $51 million this year, according to the San Francisco Business Times. The numbers were no longer where they needed to be for an IPO to make sense. Tagged canned the idea of going public and instead has refocused the company to mobile only. It also decided to completely rebrand with a the new name and logo and make Tagged a product offering rather than as a standalone company.

• More positive press for Pinterest - which rivals Facebook in some engagement metrics and is just starting to monetize: A visual social network where people create and share image collections of recipes, hairstyles, baby furniture and just about anything else on their phones or computers, Pinterest isn’t yet five years old, but among women, who make up over 80% of its users, it’s already more popular than Twitter, which has a market capitalization of more than $30 billion. Pinterest’s U.S. user base is projected to top 40 million this year, putting it in a league with both Twitter and Instagram domestically, and it’s moving fast to catch up with them overseas, opening offices in London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo over the past year. International users now make up nearly half of new sign-ups, according to the research firm Semiocast. Pinterest even doubled the number of active male users in the past year. To date, Pinterest’s users have created more than 750 million boards made up of more than 30 billion individual pins, with 54 million new ones added each day. During the 2013 holiday season Pinterest accounted for nearly a quarter of all social sharing activity. Among social networks, only Facebook, with its 1.3 billion users, drives more traffic to Web publishers. All that activity sounds big, but it understates the moneymaking opportunity in front of Pinterest, which will ultimately be judged by how much revenue it can wrest from its users. While it’s the earliest of days still, many analysts and observers believe that, on the basis of average revenue per user, it’s only a matter of time before Pinterest blows past Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social pack. “They’re going to bring in billions of dollars a year,” says Dave Weinberg, founder of the social marketing company Loop88.