Formspring revision shifted focus to "forming dialogue around interest"

Recently, according to foreign media reports, the question-and-answer website Formspring announced the company's most significant news since its launch in 2009: It shifted the focus of business from social questions to "dialogue around interest". In order to cope with this change, Formspring also made a revision of the site to highlight the company's new direction.

Formspring co-founder and CEO Edorono (Ade Olonoh) said the change reflected the way users have been active on the site over the past 6 months. He acknowledges that this is a fundamental change, but says it is following the user's behavioral trends. Orono said: "We communicate with the most involved users to understand why they are on our website, and we also observe their activities." It's clear that users are talking around interest, even if it's hard to do it on an older version of the Formspring Web site. ”

Orono says users are creating accounts that are appropriate to ask questions around a particular point of interest, and the communities they participate in are not necessarily related to their social graph.

Orono said more than 50% of formspring users were involved in an interest-based quiz, but the exact numbers were hard to determine because there was a lot of overlap between social and interest-based issues. In other words, the user is not 100% on which side. However, there are enough users to create an interest graph through formspring, so it is reasonable for the company to adjust the online experience according to the user's behavior.

The navigation bar at the top of the new site has a search box that can help you find topics you care about. And when you post a problem, you can still connect to your social graph (with buttons to share to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr). But the formspring more important thing is to let your problems be seen by the right community. Now, this is done by tagging. Tags are generated by the user, can be large categories (such as music) or small class (such as singer Adele), questions and answers can be tagged. Orono said the site also intends to provide advanced sorting functionality around the tag.

In the navigation bar on the right side of the site, users can browse the hot questions of the day, or click on the Hotspot tab, check the Inbox, and view their personal data. Formspring's attention mechanism is similar to Twitter's, and you can focus on the people who publish what you're interested in.

This shift has allowed formspring to enter a gray area--a social-centric online experience, and the ability to make your discoveries about interest. Transformed into a community-based question and answer service, which makes people feel that formspring will compete with sites like Quora. But Orono said it wasn't. "The key difference between formspring and Quora, StackOverflow or traditional question-and-answer services is that formspring focus on your opinions and personal issues." We always regard problems as the starter of conversation, not things based on facts, "he said. "Formspring is not a place for you to find the right answer, but to see what other people think." ”

"So formspring is like Twitter now, but can users write more words to respond to it?" commented one industry source.

Formspring currently has 29.5 million registered users, active monthly users between 1900 and 20 million. The company said the average active user answered more than 9 questions a day.