The Seattle-Search.com Blog

Is Classmates.com a casualty of the Facebook revolution? In what seems to be a death knell to what looked like the first pure-play social networking IPO in U.S., United Online (NSDQ: UNTD) has canceled the proposed IPO of its Classmates.com social networking unit. The company originally announced its plan to hive off the company in August, and in late November it said it expected to raise $177.7 million via the sale. But, citing the standard “market conditions,” the company now says that such a move wouldn’t be in the interest of stockholders. In other words, the interest wasn’t there. While there had been some excitement over a social networking pure-play IPO, Classmates.com, with its subscription-driven business model and earth-bound growth rates, couldn’t fully capture the buzz. United Online said it will take a $4.5-$5.5 million charge in Q4 associated with the aborted process. Release.

A recent report from Cowen & Co. analyst Jim Friedland spells out exactly why United Online couldn’t cash in with Classmates. One line sums up his thesis: “We expect the Classmates.com subscriber base to peak in the first half of 2008, followed by a steady decline to zero by 2012.” Much of the report hones in on the fact that Classmates is no Facebook. The biggest difference is that Facebook is free and offers far more robust features. Other factors weighing on Classmates.

According to analyst Joe Weisenthal, the following were the most critical deficiencies in sizing up a prospective Classmates IPO.

– Classmates has little value for young users, since there’s no need for them to re-connect; they’re already connected through other sites. Meanwhile, Facebook is making major inroads into Classmates’ adult demographic.
– User engagement is 95 percent lower than on Facebook, suggesting that users see little value in the service they’re paying for
– The company’s auto-renewal system has come under investigation at the FTC, potentially causing churn to spike.

Tacoma’s Konnects.com has launched the first professional networking platform that enables any person or organization in the world to earn revenue by creating their own professional online social network on the Konnects platform.
Konnects is a cross between Ning and Linkedin. Anyone can setup their own Konnects powered community in minutes and generate revenue through subscriptions as well as posting their own Google ads. Users have complete control over their online community with branding and communication tools as well as detailed analytical reports on community and user activity.
“We are very excited about this launch. There isn’t a tool like Konnects in the market today and we feel there is a big need to give traditional organizations a place to stay connected online,” said Jim Crabbe, Konnects CEO.
Prior to Konnects, organizations had to upload their member lists to other online professional networking sites, resulting in the organization giving up their membership base to an open ocean of online professionals. With Konnects, organizations can keep their membership connected and now have a way to generate additional revenue in the process. Organizations can even set whether their online community is open to the world or private to only their membership base.
Konnects already has relationships with newspapers, chambers of commerce, special interest groups and non profits that have created communities on the Konnects platform.

A recent blog entry from Microsoft’s Live Search announces, Use Live Search and We’ll Donate to Team Seattle and Ninemillion.org.

If you search at http://teamseattle.live.com/, Microsoft will donate $1 to Team Seattle’s Seattle’s Children’s Hospital fund. Each time you search at http://teamseattle.live.com/, Microsoft will donate $1, but it has to be at teamseattle.live.com.

In addition, if you search at http://click4thecause.live.com/, Microsoft will “contribute to ninemillion.org, a UN agency-led campaign providing education and sports programs for the nine million refugee youth around the world.” The specific amount of that contribution was not disclosed or immediately found.

The new ZotSpot search engine claims it is the first to let users and charities reap the riches of Internet Search. And the University of Washington could be one of those beneficiaries.

By using Zotspot as their primary search engine, users earn money and also have the option of allocating a portion or all of their earnings to one or more of their favorite charities or universities.

Payments, disbursed monthly through PayPal, are calculated based upon personal usage. In addition, by referring their friends, Zotspot users can add greatly to their pocketbooks or increase their donation to charities. Creating an account is quick and easy. All personal information is secure, and the data collected by Zotspot will never be sold or shared.

To set up an account, visit <http://www.zotspot.com>

Earth mapping program with information about the U.S. congressional races coming up in two weeks.

The Google Earth 2006 election resource tool, unveiled early Monday, indicates the country’s 436 congressional districts with stars on the popular 3D map of the country. Clicking on a star pops open a bubble window that has information on the candidates in that race.
googlelect

The window also includes links to news, images and Web search results on candidates, as well as to information on where and how to vote and campaign finance reform.
“Our hope is that young people using Google Earth will…make better, informed choices,” said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps.

The project was the brainchild of two members of the Google Earth team who created it during the 20 percent time allotted each week for engineers to work on special projects of their own design, Hanke said.

The election-related material is a layer on top of Google Earth, Hanke said. Google has worked on other customized layers for the U.S. National Parks Service, the Discovery Channel and National Geographic.

On Tuesday, AOL launched an election-related blog called “The Stump.”

Blogs have long been a home for personal essays and observations, but they’re also a key tool for citizen journalists. “What’s powerful about what the Web has done is it allowed a lot more voices and information to make it to the surface than ever before,” said Jeff Reifman, a Seattle software developer who worked at Microsoft for eight years. Reifman recently redesigned his news-aggregator site and changed its name from CommonTimes to NewsCloud. Now Newscloud has announced the release of the NewsCloud Service and APIs as part of its effort to make NewsCloud a fully open platform for
media distribution. Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle’s Blue Dot Inc., founders of an innovative Web site for Social Discovery® (www.bluedot.us), is offering several new features that change the way people share online and offline resources with friends and encourage further social interaction between users. Blue Dot, which has nearly tripled its user base since the launch, says the new features were added as a response to user feedback and also fits into their long term strategy to be the best way for people to share information. Read the rest of this entry »