This article was published on October 3, 2012

The Taploid wants to help you avoid being the last to know what’s happening in your friends’ lives


The Taploid wants to help you avoid being the last to know what’s happening in your friends’ lives

One of the problems that happens when you’re dealing with friends and social media is that all this information is scattered around the Internet. Some of your friends may post stuff on Twitter while others may prefer Facebook or Google+, or some simply want to share it on their blog. Quite possibly, you’re not going to find that it’s cross-posted and we don’t have time to keep track of everything that our friends do.

Enter The Taploid — your gossip tabloid for the digital age. Launched today at the DEMO conference, this brand new social network scours through your social graph to find information about your friends and puts it all together for you in a way that can either be deemed fun or just simply creepy.

The Taploit

After logging into the site, you’ll get a daily digest of stories aggregated by the service. The data obtained by the service is turned into what The Taploid calls “a personalized magazine containing relevant stories, news, silly gossip, and funny interactions all centered on you, the reader, and your friends.” Through the use of natural language processing and data mining, the team built an engine to parse and track the chain of events through social data. In the end, the reader is going to be able to get a glimpse into what’s been going on with their friends’ lives.

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Founded by two serial entrepreneurs, Redg Snodgrass (former VP of Business Development at Skout.com and Head of Innovation at Alcatel-Lucent) and Andrew Scott (founder of the mobile-based social network “playtxt”, the personalization engine startup Rummble, among other ventures), The Taploid is pretty busy analyzing some serious data. Already it has over 700,000 pieces of social data analyzed and it’s rapidly increasing. And right now you can only sign in using Facebook Connect, which leads one to believe only Facebook data is looked at, not Twitter or any other network, though you can probably bet that this is coming soon.

The Taploid has already raised some early stage seed funding from Ballpark Ventures, Steve Pankhurst, and Steve Schlenker, to name a few. The company just presented at the Fall 2012 edition of the DEMO conference and will most likely have some more funding news to share later on. VentureBeat points out that the company is looking to raise its Series A in November.

One thing to point out when you’re viewing the “gossip” on the service, you might find things a bit confusing and probably somewhat bizarre. I suppose that falls in line with what you normally find on the tabloid rack in a supermarket. But go ahead and check it out — the service has now opened up to beta users and you’ll need to use your Facebook credentials to log in.

Photo credit: Fox News

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