Niche social apps will save us from the AI Armageddon [LeWeb]

Soraya Darabi has been thrown into social media and in five years has gained more experience than most of you reading this combined. She went from media to the startup world with brief stints at Drop.io (acquired by Facebook) to Foodspotting and is now getting ready to launch her own startup.

Speaking at LeWeb London, Darabi said something interesting. She believes that the future of social is niche applications.

She’s putting a dream team together with developers from The New York Times, Drop.io and Foodspotting. And surprisingly her startup has nothing to do with social apparently (I’m guessing media-based).

Frasier Kelton from GetGlue on the other hand, is deeply embedded in the social scene. GetGlue is practically an old-timer in the checkin-based, badge-giving, mobile-only application. If you’re not familiar with GetGlue, you check into a TV show, Movie or other media, but over the years it has become obvious that GetGlue has optimised for Hollywood.

16-25% of all social activity around a TV show happens through GetGlue.

In the coming weeks GetGlue will be rolling out some new features that will reinvent the TV Guide. But listening to Kelton it’s obvious that his company’s been getting a lot of user data and is starting to put it to good use.

Kelton also made a comment that supports Darabi’s statement about the future of social being niche. He pointed out that Craigslist is not being disrupted by the next Craigslist but by dozens of apps tailored to specific categories (AirBnB being one example).

But I think they’re on to something here. If we spread our social networking out to across multiple social networks, especially private networks, then the analytic overlords won’t be able to accurate predict our behaviour.