Facebook picks up team behind online reputation startup Legit in talent acquisition deal
Facebook is adding the two founders of Legit, a startup that runs an online reputation system, to its team after the young company announced that it had been ‘aquihired’ by the Menlo Park-based social network. Not price for the deal — which was quietly announced last week – has been disclosed.
Bay Area-based Legit’s service pulls in details from across the Web to assess an Internet users’ trustworthiness, and is specifically designed for social marketplace services where people want to know that the person they are buying services from won’t rip them off. First known as Quantifi, then Cred, and now Legit, the service aims to provide a gauge of reliability for services such as Airbnb, Lyft.
As well as two names, Legit has been through a series of pivots during its short life. The startup switched from its initial consumer-first approach, to product a widget for marketplaces but, following issues convincing third parties to adopt the widget, it settled on a cross-platform reputation system.
A notice on Legit’s homepage – first spotted by TechCrunch — explains that it has been bought by Facebook, and it also outlines what services that the company provided following its two pivots:
When we began working on Legit, our goal was to build a company that could help us answer the question, “Can I trust this person who I have never met?”
…
We dug in to build a cross-platform reputation system, the LRG. This system would be purely backend-focused at first, and as it scaled, we believed this system could then interface with the user via a marketplace. Our learning here was that data sharing does not make sense with the current scale of the sharing economy. We evaluated data from several partners and learned that the communities of most sharing companies are not large enough to warrant a piece of infrastructure like the LRG.
The Legit service is being closed down, as is the case with talent acquisitions such as this deal, but the two founders’ skills in helping build trust barometers for the Web are an interesting addition for Facebook. The social network is the backbone for a number of services already, and any features that can help services like Airbnb and Lyft users assess their users with greater detail and reliability will be beneficial for Facebook and help establish it as a reliable founding platform for other services.
“Facebook is a core piece of infrastructure for many marketplaces as the source of your offline authenticity and reliability. While we will be working on other initiatives within Facebook, we remain huge advocates of the Sharing Economy / Collaborative Consumption and are confident the movement will continue to grow,” Legit founders JB and Rob added.
Headline image via laughingsquid / Flickr
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BandPage Helps Any Musician Get Richer By Selling One-Of-A-Kind Experiences To Top Fans
Whales are big spenders, the ones that prop up casinos and social games. In music, whales are bands’ rabid fans. BandPage‘s new “Experiences“ feature lets artists sell them seats on stage, unique merch, or even a trip to the bowling alley with the band. The shift from MP3s to streaming means monetizing the long tail that earns musicians cents not dollars, but BandPage Experiences could keep them afloat.
Whether you’re a chart-topping artist or a garage band, somebody loves you, and they’re willing to pay a ton to get closer to you. BandPage Experiences creates a marketplace and an embeddable e-commerce widget where artists can offer less-scalable VIP access, meet-ups with band, and limited-edition merchandise.
It’s a smart new experiment from BandPage. Once known as RootMusic, BandPage lets artists set up a profile app on Facebook full of streaming music, tour dates and media. At one point it had 500,000 bands and 32 million monthly Facebook users. It made money on a cheap subscription to extra customization and virality options, and raised a total of $18.3 million.
But Facebook’s Timeline redesign a year ago hit it hard. Without the ability to be a band’s default landing page for non-fans, traffic plummeted to around 1 million users. Since then it’s tried to unshackle from Facebook with BandPage Everywhere and Connect, which lets musicians create synced websites and widgets so they can publish once but update all their online presences.
BandPage CEO J Sider explains that most artists are missing out on huge revenue by restricting themselves to standard touring, merch and music sales. “It’s like a coffee shop that’s only open two or three times a year. We want to open it up year-round. If they gave you more experiences, you’d be willing to spend more on the [artists] you really love. It’s for well-known acts down to bands that are just starting out [for who] earning a couple hundred extra bucks per show can make a big difference.”
Along with helping artists get richer, Experiences turns BandPage into an e-commerce company that will earn a 15 percent cut of what bands earn by offering special treatment through Experiences. By definition, artists can’t sell too many of these unique opportunities. BandPage has to hope the idea of hyper-monetizing the short head rather than focusing on the long tail catches on.
Sider likens this new chapter in BandPage’s evolution to aggregating what fans waste time wishing and searching for. “There are fan clubs across the Internet, but as fans it can be hard to reach them. We can create a marketplace the way Airbnb and Kickstarter did. We see a huge potential for musicians to make a living off of it.”
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