Spring Brings Funding for Formspring.me
Is there room for another socially oriented question-and-answer service on the Web?
That’s actually a question I just posted on one such service, Formspring.me, to Ade Olonoh, its co-founder and chief executive.
If you haven’t yet heard of it, Formspring.me is a fast-growing forum for people to ask and answer personal questions. Users register an account on the site, link it to their Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or other accounts, then ask and answer questions and can publish those answers to the major social networks.
The formula has turned out to be somewhat infectious. The site, introduced over the Thanksgiving holiday last year, has received 50 million unique visitors over the last 30 days, according to the company. Three hundred million questions have been answered on the service since its introduction, and the site has drawn such attention in social media circles that it was actually the subject of a fast-spreading hoax on Twitter earlier this month during the South by Southwest conference.
Riding the momentum, the six-employee, Indianapolis start-up has just raised 2ドル.5 million from a group of Silicon Valley investors, and it is planning to move to San Francisco this month. Investors include Baseline Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and individual investors like the Digg founder Kevin Rose and the former Facebook executive Dave Morin.
At first glance, Formspring.me appears to sit alongside Aardvark, ChaCha and Yahoo Answers in the expanding realm of online question-and-answer sites. But while those sites are likely to yield useful facts or practical opinions (what’s the best ice cream shop in San Francisco?) Mr. Olonoh and John Wechsler, the company’s president, say they are more interested in allowing people to express their personalities by asking and answering personal questions — mirroring the exchanges people have when they meet for the first time.
So Formspring.me users are likely to ask, and answer, questions about their favorite beer, the first concert they attended and whether they believe in the afterlife.
“With formspring.me, the intent is to be a communication platform that enables conversations with friends,” Mr. Olonoh wrote, responding to the question I had left on his Formspring page. “You ask questions to specific people that you probably already know. There are certainly experts on formspring.me that can answer questions, but you already know them because you’re friends with them, you read their blog, follow them on Twitter, or similar.”
“I really do think that formspring.me is fundamentally different than other Q&A services,” he wrote.