Tagged Opens Its Own Social Game Studio
Social network Tagged will announce Tuesday that it is launching its own in-house social game studio and that it has hired a former VP of Electronic Arts to run it.
Tagged, which has more than 100 million users, is already in the business of making social games, so the move isn’t a big surprise. Its most popular game, Pets, has 375,000 unique daily active users and conducts five million trades per day.
Tagged also revealed to Mashable that Pets generates more than $1 million per month in revenue for the company. That’s a huge number for a company that generated $32 million in revenue in 2010. It’s easy to see why Tagged is making a big investment in its social games platform, especially if it can create another smash hit like Pets.
To get the new game studio running, Tagged has hired Andrew Petersen, the former VP and General Manager for EA’s Pogo, where he led the development of more than 100 games. He’s also spent time at BlueNoodle, Mattel, The Learning Company and Broderbund Software and helped create well-known franchises like Carmen Sandiego and Prince of Persia. Petersen’s new title is vice president & general manager of social games.
Tagged is one of the few social networks that has somehow found a way to prosper despite Facebook’s dominance in the space. It has amassed more than 100 million users (for comparison, Facebook has 600+ million) by focusing on being a place to meet new people based on shared interests. It recently acquired instant messaging client Digsby in an attempt to add more social communication options to its platform.
The company says that it already has three titles in development and plans to double it game design team in the next few months.
Yes we are hiring :)
Tagged Buys Popular Social/Instant Messaging Client Digsby
Tagged, the San Francisco-based social network that is most notable because of its ability to grow profitably during the Facebook era, has closed its first acquisition. dotSyntax, the corporation that created the popular Digsby instant messaging and social client, is now part of Tagged. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but all seven dotSyntax employees will join Tagged.
Tagged CEO Greg Tseng says that they intend to keep the Digsby software as a standalone product, and also incorporate features into Tagged over time. Says Tseng: “They have expertise and technology in real-time communications which we want to use to push into instant messaging, group chat, video chat, etc. IM is our most requested feature on Tagged.”
Digsby has 3 million registered users today (Tagged has over 100 million), and the company has raised $500,000 in funding.
If you’re unfamiliar with Digsby, there’s a good overview video here showing how the product works. It allows users to interact with social networks, webmail and instant messaging services. Websites can also integrate Digsby into their sites.
Woohoo! Tagged makes its first successful acquisition.
Google Infrastructure Czar: Cloud is about getting it done.
http://gigaom.com/2011/04/12/google-infrastructure-czar-cloud-is-about-gettin...Inc. 5000 Applicant of the Week: Tagged
Inc. 5000 Applicant of the Week: Tagged
It isn't the next Facebook or Myspace, but this social network is giving users some of the Internet candy they crave: games, new connections, and even a hot date or two.
By Christine Lagorio | @lagorio |
Tagged founders Johann Schleier-Smith and Greg Tseng are reinventing their social-networking site to be a place to meet new people through common interests and playing games.
As applications for the 2011 Inc. 500 | 5000 arrive, we thought it would be worthwhile to shine a spotlight on some of the companies that are vying to appear on our ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. (For more information and to apply, go to http://www.inc.com/inc5000apply/2011/index.html.) One that caught our eye was Tagged, one of the first social networks (it was founded in 2004), which aims to foster new social connections through games and linking people with shared interests. It's based in San Francisco, employs 65 people, and was ranked No. 476 on the Inc. 5000 in 2010.
When Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith set out to build a popular site for young people in the early 2000s, they ended up in direct competition with Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. Well, we all know how that turned out.
"Yeah, we didn't win that battle," says Tseng, who is now 31 and the company's CEO. "So in 2007, we decided if Tagged wasn't the place to keep in touch with people we know, it would be the place to meet new people through common interests and playing games."
It's working. While Tagged might not be a household name, it is ranked in the 200s in Alexa rankings of Internet traffic, and the site boasts more than 100 million registered users worldwide who form more than 100 million new friend connections every month. With revenue coming from advertising and trading dollars for the site's virtual currency, gold, Tagged reported 2010 revenue of more than $32 million.
How exactly does it work? Users create profiles, post photos, give each other sparkly, elaborate virtual gifts, and interact, largely through games. The three most popular uses for Tagged are dating, games, and sharing interests, in that order, Tseng says. The most popular game on Tagged, according to Tseng, is called Pets. It's slightly Machiavellian: a user is able to "buy" another user and count his or her among his or her brood of pets.
There have been some bumps in the road to fostering social connections. After re-designing the site's registration process in mid-2009, Tseng and Schleier-Smith, now 32 and the company's CTO, were bombarded with mail from livid users. The accusation: the site had e-mailed the new registrant's entire address book inviting them to come look at photos of the registrant. Tseng struggled to remove the feature quickly in the face of user fury. In June 2009, Time magazine called Tagged "The world's most annoying website." The site was also blocked in 2009 in Qatar, where it had been among the 10 most popular websites, due to possibly inappropriate content.
But user numbers and new registrations barely took a hit. Today, Tagged is still refining its registration process, and is focusing on new games and products—such as a mobile app—to keep the site growing globally. Tseng himself is focusing on doubling the staff size over the next year, but also on keeping his growing company operating like a start-up.
"Our culture is really collaborative—we are all about team chemistry. There is no hierarchy or rank," he says. "We are all just working together to achieve our goal, which is to allow anyone to meet people."
I commute everyday 1 hour from San Jose to Tagged. I love the transparency, and independence I am given to get my job done. We are moving forward and growing. Check out all the areas we are hiring for: http://about-tagged.com/jobs
Case Study: Battling a Media (and Legal) Firestorm
Case Study: Battling a Media (and Legal) Firestorm
Users were angry, the media hostile. Then the state attorneys started investigating.
By Darren Dahl | From the April 2011 issue of Inc. magazine
Toby Burditt
Stormy Weather Greg Tseng (left) and Johann Schleier-Smith were accused of spamming thousands of would-be customers.
Greg Tseng, CEO of the social networking website Tagged, had just landed in Manila, on Saturday, June 6, 2009, to kick off a long-awaited vacation. As soon as he dragged his jet-lagged body up to his hotel room, though, an onslaught of phone calls, e-mails, and text messages from his co-founder, Johann Schleier-Smith, and other Tagged employees began: Something was seriously wrong with the site.
In the 24 hours since Tseng had left his office in San Francisco, thousands of complaints had been filed by users—who claimed that Tagged's new registration process had somehow tricked them into spamming all of the contacts in their e-mail address books. For Tseng, the news was puzzling. The registration process had been extensively tested before going live. Why were problems emerging now? He asked Schleier-Smith to shut the system down and perform another series of quality tests. Meanwhile, Tseng organized an emergency transpacific conference call to get his management team and advisory board up to speed.
The new system had been live for just 72 hours. But Tseng soon discovered that he had not been fast enough in shutting it down.
Coping with crisis was a new experience for Tseng, who had known little but success in his brief time as an entrepreneur. He and Schleier-Smith, friends since junior high school, founded Tagged in 2004, after graduating from Harvard and spending a couple of years studying physics at Stanford. Of course, that was the same year another Harvard kid, Mark Zuckerberg, started his networking site: Facebook. But where Facebook focused on connecting college students, Tseng and Schleier-Smith targeted the teen market. By the end of 2006, Tagged had about 12 million users.
Still, Tagged was far behind Facebook and Myspace. In 2007, Tseng and Schleier-Smith decided to refocus the site. Tagged would help users discover new relationships, rather than simply maintain existing ones, as on Facebook. And it would no longer focus solely on teens. That new direction helped propel the company into the upper tier of social networking sites.
Yet Tagged continued to operate in the shadow of Facebook, which reportedly was adding a million new users every day. Tseng and Schleier-Smith began to tinker with the way Tagged pitched potential customers. First, they made it easier for new users to invite their friends to the site by automatically importing the new users' online address books—a common practice among other social networking sites. Meanwhile, after analyzing Facebook's marketing efforts, Tseng and Schleier-Smith discovered that teasers that promised to show users photos of their friends led to higher conversion rates. So they produced a photo-based come-on of their own.
After three months of testing, the new registration system debuted on June 4. Two days later, as Tseng flew to the Philippines, the flood of complaints began.
Tagged's developers retested the software for bugs but found none. Instead, the problem seemed to be a confusing registration process. The developers had made sure to include multiple steps and confirmations throughout the process, which included clicking a button that would send out invitations from Tagged to everyone in the user's address book. But new users were apparently surprised when their contacts began receiving e-mails encouraging them to check out their photos on Tagged. "I think people accidentally clicked through the warnings," says Tseng. "Then they got angry and frustrated—and blamed us."
Tseng and Schleier-Smith posted an apology on the site's blog and sent another one via e-mail to the some three million users around the world who had signed up during the prior few days. In the e-mail, they also outlined the steps any user could take to deactivate his or her account.
Only a few hundred people jumped ship, so the situation seemed to be under control. Tseng decided to stay in the Philippines as planned. Then Sean Gregory, a writer at Time, posted an online story about his experience with the site that ran on June 11 with the headline, "Tagged: The World's Most Annoying Website." "I got these e-mails from my wife and best friends that made me say, 'What the heck is this? Should I touch this?' " Gregory later said in an interview on Good Morning America. "It made me so angry." In his story, Gregory acknowledged that Tagged had apologized, yet he still advised readers to "avoid the site altogether." Soon, dozens more writers and bloggers piled on. Nonetheless, registrations and opt-outs continued at their normal levels. Again, Tagged seemed to have skirted serious trouble.
But not for long. The company's in-house lawyer received a call and a letter from the office of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on June 12, requesting information about what had happened and Tagged's response. Over the next few weeks, the offices of Texas's attorney general and San Francisco's district attorney called with similar requests, and a private lawyer filed a class action. "That was the start of a very dark period," says Tseng. "I started asking myself, 'Is it all worth it?' " He grew depressed and had difficulty sleeping.
Yet Another Senior MySpace Exec Bails: SVP Tish Whitcraft Joins Tagged
“Tish Whitcraft recently joined MySpace as SVP of Customer Care responsible for delivering a world-class user experience to the 250 million + MySpace users,” the company said in mid 2008 when Whitcraft, a seasoned big company executive, joined the team. Now, three years later Whitcraft joins countless other MySpace execs, and about 190 million of those 250 million users, and leaves.
She’s joining Tagged, a social network that has somehow survived, and even thrived, in a Facebook world. Her first day at Tagged as Chief Customer Officer is on Monday morning.
Part of her job will be what CEO Greg Tseng is calling “onshoring” of a bunch of customer service jobs. Fifty customer service reps working with Tagged in India as contractors will be let go, and the company will be replacing them with new full time employee hires in San Francisco.
Tagged, with more than 100 million users, is on track to meet their $50 million revenue goal this calendar year, and are currently at a $40 million run rate, says Tseng. They have 65 full time employees, and will be at 100 by year end (not including the new customer service reps).
Do You Need a Social Media Detox?
Do You Need a Social Media Detox - http://pulsene.ws/14KtX - Even though we are not Catholic (Lutheran) my wife has given up Facebook for Lent. She has discovered more time.Apple iPad 2 vs Motorola Xoom
I thought this was a great comparison video on both iPad2 and the Xoom. Personally I am looking to get the Xoom because it will be more functional for my needs.
