“We are who we follow” is the phrase that sits at the top of PostPost’s About Us page. This Boston-built social search product has at its foundation that you follow people for a reason, and it is sure to be there for you as your social networks continue to grow and expand.
PostPost allows you to tap into what the people you follow on Twitter and Flickr have said and shared. The product helps ensure that all the content being shared by the people you trust (and on the subjects important to you) doesn’t slip through the cracks. Moving forward the company plans to offer the technology to publishers and product websites to help consumers make better purchase decisions. In doing so, PostPost aims to put the holy grail of capturing word-of-mouth influence online in check-mate.
Social Search on PostPost
Want to stay on top of a subject for your job? How about commentary around breaking news or current events? All you have to do is enter the term into PostPost and a personalized stream will appear showing what the people you follow have said or shared about it. And if it is something you want to follow more closely moving forward, all you have to do is save it to your profile as a “Postpost.”
One of the first searches I made on PostPost was for “Nuance” given the rumors yesterday that Apple was acquiring this Boston-area company. As it turns out, 169 people I follow on Twitter have mentioned the term in the past several months. Granted the search picked up other uses and versions of the word, it was really neat to skim through commentary that some of the leaders in the tech space I follow had shared – commentary that definitely had slipped through the cracks that day. I could even scroll through and limit the results to just a few, select people.
The next search I made was for “postpost,” and discovered someone on our team had actually mentioned the company a couple weeks ago. I had to search for “Bostinnovation” next, and couldn’t help but smile when it spit back, “We’d like to list everybody who said something about bostinnovation, but if we did the site would crash.”
PostPost’s Story and Future
PostPost launched in beta less than a month ago, and the company just yesterday released a new homepage and upgraded its search capabilities. The site has a clean design and is simple to use and navigate, which comes as no surprise since PostPost is a product of the Waltham-based agency Boathouse.
The idea for the product came from Boathouse’s Brad Noble, who directs the product, and was built using Boathouse capital and resources. Noble told us they plan to scale this way in the short term, but that this will not likely always be the case. “Our goal is to get to 10,000 users as fast as possible, to see what we see regarding site usage and operating costs,” said Noble. “When we get there, we’ll decide whether or not we should break PostPost out on its own, and with what funding, inside or outside. Or both.”
While Noble said they plan to make minimal product enhancements according to how their initial users are adopt the product, the company’s next big initiative is distributing PostPost to partner sites where people are making purchase decisions. “Imagine a button on the Angry Birds page on the App Store that reads, ‘Wanna see what the people you follow think about Angry Birds?’ Clicking that button will kick off an asynchronous PostPost search for “Angry Birds”; the results that appear right there in that page will be what the people you follow have said about the product in question.”
With the power of word-of-mouth in driving incremental sales, PostPost is something companies and publishers will likely happily pay for. And as PostPost moves toward this monetization it plans to stick to its core in search: “Ultimately: [the goal is] to unlock the value in each person’s online social history.”
Read more about PostPost on their About page, and make sure to follow this Boston area company’s growth on Twitter!
