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In the last five years, social networking has evolved from being a new, innovative, stand-alone concept to a must-have set of features for almost any website. Today, marquee consumer destination websites need to differentiate on a unique and deep value offering, but almost every website benefits from the innovations in virality engagement, and user retention that social networking has brought to the world.
At the end of 2006, we at Pivotal Labs saw the beginnings of a major shift in our client base. That year saw the proportion of projects with major social networking components increase from just a single project at the beginning of the year to over 70% of our new projects in the fourth quarter.
While social networking features constituted a significant proportion of the functionality of the sites we were building, none of them were differentiating solely on these features. Instead, they were innovating in how they leveraged these features to support their core value proposition.
We saw an opportunity to add significant value by leveraging our own expertise in the social networking space to build a suite of reusable components. Put simply, why should each client implement social features from scratch, when we could provide them with a reusable, best of breed implementation, one that would shorten their time to market, allow them to implement a broader, deeper set of features, and, most importantly, let them focus on their core differentiating features, the secret sauce that's going to make them relevant in the marketplace.
You don't buy a Mercedes or a Ferrari based on the tires. At the same time, neither is quite as valuable without them.
The Pivotal Social Media Platform provides all the plumbing for the following feature areas:
(See the slide deck for more detail on each of the above features.)
Unlike most social networking products, our platform is designed for deep integration. If we've done our work right, you shouldn't be able to tell where the application ends and the framework begins. You've probably seen examples of the Frankenstein's Monster user experience, where social features are bolted onto the side, or worse, where the core feature is pushed off to the side by cookie cutter clones of Facebook or Myspace. There's some basic scaffolding to get you bootstrapped, but once you have a coherent design for your site, we skin the plugins to create a seamless and infinitely customizable user experience based on the needs of your application.
We've launched a lot of projects using our platform, and there are more in the works. Below are a few examples:
SpongeFish is a User-Generated eLearning site. Users create lessons using video, pictures, and text to share the things they know.
BringLight is a charitable giving site. Users fund their donor account, and then give money to worthy causes.
We're also eating our own dogfood. PivotalBlabs is our blog site, built on our platform.
You want to know: Just who are these Pivots? It's a good question. Check us out.
© 2007 Pivotal Labs. All rights reserved. contact@pivotallabs.com