Most people who belong to today’s highly wired generation of Internet users agree that it is a little tough to keep track of all the social media outlets they subscribe to — from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to blogs and various niche social networks.
They are also often bothered by the fact that people who follow them may find it difficult to find them on the networks on which they are most active.
That is where Bangalore-based Gizapage.com steps in with a solution for those who want to build a hub for all their social interactions online. Ask founders Vijay Raypathi and Amit Jaipuria, and they will tell you that it all started when a group of friends were hanging out and talking about how the social web was evolving.
“We talked about the different services out there and the difficulties in keeping track of each other’s profiles; hence the decision to develop an identity aggregator such as GizaPage,” Jaipuria says.
Though services such as FriendFeed (taken over by Facebook later) existed then, they found it to be insufficient.
“What FriendFeed did was to take updates of content by a user from across multiple sites and put them on a lifestream. In our case, we aggregated the individual profiles and published them on GizaPage — so one could go deeper into exploring each other’s content and profile,” Jaipuria adds.
Profiles on the site look very different from the stream of links that one has gotten accustomed to on services like Twitter. Here, when you open a person’s profile, you see an ‘about’ page and every social network is represented in separate tabs within a website.
They also provide a widget that can be used on your blog playing the role of a social network visiting card. The site was launched in mid-2009 and faced a few problems after some US tech-blogs wrote about their service, calling it slow.
“Yes, we had a few issues in the beginning. But now we have done some performance optimisations and our pages load almost 200% faster compared to what it was at our launch time,” Raypathi says.
The service is now concentrating on making hubs for business brands that have also gone social in the past year. “Brands today have websites that are fairly non-social. They have, so far, been relying on advertising and PR to build brand equity with their consumers; increasingly brands are finding the need to join the conversation, build loyalty and trust from the ground up. In order to do this, the brands increasingly participate on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr etc to make their content more social. GizaPage social media hubs would allow the brand to now aggregate this social content from across multiple footprints and bring it to one place with their own social URL and visual identity,” Jaipuria says. Raypathi adds that having a social media hub helps brands have a single identity.
The site also offers analytics and metrics for each profile which can help brands specifically monitor their influence on networks.
Two brands using the service are the US-based Smithsonian museum and Bangalore-based Pratham Books.
The site currently has paid and free versions; the free version will have a ‘powered by gizapage’ prominently on the home tab, but the paid version gives brands and normal users also the power to design their own custom home pages.
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