Path
Path is all about your closest ties. Social media can be really unwieldy when you have 500 Facebook friends and 1,000 Twitter friends. Path has a maximum of 50 friends – you really can’t add any more after that! It’s a refreshing take on relevance – you only share and receive info with the people you truly care about.
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GroupMe
A new trend is with small, temporary chat rooms. GroupMe is an app that helps you do group texting and conference calls. Facebook and Twitter can be less personal and harder to keep your eye on all the time. Texting is a more intimate and immediate form of communication.
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SocialSmack
People are always spouting their opinions about brands, but there isn’t a place where those opinions are aggregated, and people have a system of credibility and real identity. SocialSmack is an awesome Austin-based startup making it easy to “prop” or “drop” a brand and see high-quality discussion.
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Facebook recently made big updates to its Groups feature. One of the major issues with the old original feature was the lack of integration with the newsfeed and other parts of the site. The new groups are lightweight, accessible from the homepage, and mobile – meaning you can have intimate discussions relevant to specific groups of people in your life and specific topics – on the go.
BazaarBlog
BazaarVoice is another Austin-based company helping create relevance and credibility with user-generated content. They power integrations for companies to do reviews on their websites. Companies are finally realizing that in general nearly 90% of feedback is positive – that it’s something to embrace and be proactive about. It makes a brand seem truly credible when their site has real people leaving public feedback.
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