BranchOut Offers Better Career Networking on Facebook; Plus, a Q&A with Founder Rick Marini
Apps with a practical focus have had limited success on Facebook, especially when compared to the growth of social gaming on the platform. But BranchOut is looking to change that — it’s a recently-launched Facebook application that wants to help people build their career networks through their real-life friends.
In the article below, we’ll see how the app fits into the existing career networking ecosystem. We’ll also talk with founder and serial entrepreneur Rick Marini about his views on industry topics like Facebook’s viral channels, the next generation of social games, and the opportunity in utilities.
Marini co-founded personality test site Tickle.com in 1999, growing it to become the 18th largest site on the internet before selling it to Monster.com for more than $100 million in 2004. He and his team of 80 worked at Monster.com for three years before he left with six handpicked employees to found SuperFan. The social entertainment hub lets users create content for the site and spend virtual currency to prove they are the biggest fans of their favorite media, celebrities and more. SuperFan uses Facebook for login and viral distribution of activity and also runs a Facebook application in conjunction with the site.
Marini launched BranchOut.com on July 20th, 2010 out of the same office as SuperFan, and came out of a workplace experience. An associate asked him for a sales lead introduction to a company Marini knew one of his Facebook friends worked at, but he couldn’t remember which friend. He realized an app that listed where your friends worked could not only help people find jobs, like the Simply Hired Facebook Connect site, but could be a career networking platform. The seven person company includes five engineers, and is self-funded by Marini, with no sponsors or advertising.
The definition of “friends” now encompasses professional contacts, and Facebook features like friend lists help users manage distribution of information to segments of their increasingly heterogeneous network. Therefore, as Marini tells us, it makes sense to find career contacts through one’s existing friend network, instead of cultivating a specific professional network like LinkedIn. “I’ll accept anyone into my LinkedIn network,” he explains, “but I’m much more motivated to help my [Facebook friends, who are my] support group get a lead, even friends of friends.”
BranchOut – A Facebook Utility
BranchOut’s primary feature is the ability to search for a company and see all of your friends who list that they’ve worked there. Additionally, if one of your friends installs BranchOut, you can see the work histories of their friends as well. To unlock this second degree of network information, users are encouraged to invite friends to join BranchOut through a multi-friend selector which can send wall posts or private messages, or by sharing a unique referral URL.
The BranchOut home page also features a list of the companies at which you have the most contacts; a feed of showing new friend additions, changes to friends’ work info, and people you’ve recently stopped being friends with; and a quick link to edit your own work info. The “Jobs” tab, powered by Indeed, shows any job postings friends have listed in to help out their network or earn referral bonuses. Adding a job posting is free.
BranchOut’s funnest feature is the ability to browse an archive of all your friends and their work histories. You might otherwise never have bothered to check a new friend’s work info to see he used to work at MTV. Currently, there is no public data on BranchOut, whether from Facebook profiles without privacy restrictions, or from Twitter or LinkedIn. Integrations with those services may be included in the future, though.
Marini says some next steps for BranchOut include internationalization, and adding the ability to search for job titles, not just company names. The company is working with Facebook on how to normalize work info data. Currently, many users haven’t changed their work info since they joined Facebook, or purposefully have self-described job titles like “Under the florescent lights” instead of “Lead Engineer.” BranchOut is considering a “Remind them to update” button, or appealing to Facebook to increase the visibility of “work info change” feed stories which could stimulate these updates.
BranchOut provides career network data for those who don’t want to build up a separate network on a service like LinkedIn. While not as full featured, it focuses on fostering connections, not reading resumes. As long as users have an appropriate profile picture, privacy and reputation concerns are minimal, and they can get career help from friends who want them to succeed.
Q&A on Viral Channels, The Next Generation of Social Games, and Facebook Utilities
Inside Facebook: How do you think the alterations to Facebook’s viral channels have influenced the application ecoystem?
Rick Marini: It forced developers to look for other ways to build their user base. Look at Facebook’s giant user base – less than half of them are playing social games yet a big chunk of the news feed was dominated by game related activity – it made sense to meet the needs of [non-game players]. If there was a benefit for them through marketing revenue, that was a secondary thought. It comes back to great content that users want to share. If you’re a smaller developer you need to step up the content because you don’t have the pockets of the big three [Zynga, Playdom, and Playfish].
IF: What do you think about Facebook allowing developers to request a user’s email address?
RM: The big push for allowing that actually came from developers. Facebook said “we’ll do that, and if the app does the wrong thing, the user will uninstall it.” The consequence is that Facebook isn’t in the middle being blamed if the developer is being spammy. Facebook acts as the facilitators and not the channel. There’s thousands of developers, lots want that direct relationship with the user, and Facebook doesn’t need to be in between if apps are doing the right thing.
IF: Do you think there’s more innovation to be done around the remaining viral channels?
RM: The invite request channel is now on the lower right rail – it’d be nice to have more prominence, a balance, but I fall on the side of Facebook. I don’t like the idea of spamming for points. If you have a game like Mafia Wars where the larger your crew is the more power you have in the game, you’re so engaged in the content of the game that you want to invite people.
I’d love to see Facebook work with certain trusted, preferred partners who won’t be spammy. It would allow them to experiment with viral channels like direct contacting or removing the invite cap.
IF: What do you think is the next big step for social game developers?
RM: More personalization like friends’ [names and photos] that you can bring into a game as passive players, and games that involve your friends – not just as a neighbor like in FarmVille but as an active part of the game play.
Wonderhill is a favorite. They have some beautiful design that differentiates them from others. I’d like to see devs go to the next generation of design. Wheras the first gen of social games are more akin to a Mario Bros., the next gen in terms of graphics will be more like today’s [console games]. What happened over a ten to fifteen year period on consoles is happening over a three year period with social games.
Console developers spend tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars on a single game. There’s a lot of thought that goes into mechanics and design that should go into Facebook platform games – with that creativity and beauty taken to a higher level – I want to see that happen online. We already saw it with EA buying Playfish – I don’t think it’s the evolution of console gaming going away, but expanding the console offering so you can play on both [the computer and the television].
IF: What do you think of the gaming maturity level of most social game players?
RM: Not necessarily by design but to the benefit of social gaming is that it started pretty simple. FarmVille is a pretty simple game, simple design, but it attracted a lot of people who didn’t come from a gaming background. That’s great because if social games had immediately advanced to the modern Grand Theft Auto level, you wouldn’t have those people playing. Mario was a great game but soon you want faster, prettier, more. If you only give them simple content, then people are going to get bored.
I think people are going to mature — for a lot of people, the first time you play Farmville it’s a little challenging, then you get hooked for several months, then your friends are moving to the next game with better graphics and a little more game play. As that happens, each time you play a new game you’re expecting better graphics, mechanics, music — whatever the new features are will get more complex — games have to do that to keep people hooked. People have a short attention span. If you expect them to play the same game for years – it’s unlikely. Social gaming hasn’t advanced to a place like World of Warcraft but we’re going three to five times the speed.
IF: What game types are going to succeed in the social ecosystem. Is there a place for twitch game styles?
RM: I think the games that require mores strategy and thoughtfulness hook you in much longer, especially if you can involve friends. An easy strategic game is Words With Friends. It’s not twitch like Bejeweled Blitz, it’s something you actually have to think about it, so you can play for months and months with friends.
I think games like WOW — long term strategic games you can build communities around whether a small group of friends or a large community like a tribe or a guild — those are the games that are really long lasting. Plus, with social you can constantly iterate. Unlike a console game which goes out on the shelf, Mafia Wars can keep adding new cities, new challenges and tasks while keeping that community there. Once you’ve got a large mafia, it’s harder to leave because you have to leave a community. If you can hook people into a larger group, you’ve got that social dynamic keeping them there much longer.
IF: What about non-game applications?
RM: Layering utility on top of the platform will be big. Utility spaces include dating and careers. What’s been big on the dot com side that hasn’t been brought to Facebook? We think the utility space will be important in the next ten years.
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Yesterday, Oodle released an iPhone app interface that connects users to Oodle Marketplace, as well as the Oodle-powered Facebook Marketplace. Called “Marketplace for Oodle & Facebook”, the app lets users quickly make “for sale”, “wanted”, and “free” posts; view listings by friends and friends of friends; and browse items listed nearby. Upon release, app had some performance issues, with some tabs frequently failing to load, and photos added to postings not always showing up in listings.
Once users of the app log in to Facebook and allow it to use their location, they’ll see the Marketplace home screen. From there they can add a new posting, view their existing postings, see counts of how many items are listed by friends and friends of friends, and see two recent postings from their network. Posting categories include offering and seeking items for sale, real estate, apartments and rentals, vehicles, and jobs.
Searching for postings is straightforward, but the smallest proximity you can refine your search to is 5 miles, which isn’t very helpful in metropolitan areas. Sharing to Facebook is easy but leaves out price, the inclusion of which can be important for drawing clicks to common but heavily discounted items.
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Our demographic data for all three games show that each has a fairly different gender profile. Kingdoms of Camelot, for example, is the only one of the three that’s heavily male, an observation that makes sense given that Camelot is a strategy game with a fantasy theme, a genre that has traditionally appealed more to men.
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