Chime.in Will Try to Solve Relevance, Monetization Problems

Marketers might not be too terribly excited to learn that yet one more social network is launching. Chime.in will use a 250-character plus one image format, plus a topical format that organizes information contributed to the social network based on interests. 


A user might follow a particular person, but only some posts, on certain topics. Chime.in also will try to sort posts so that more-relevant or "better" content rises to the top of the feed. 


Existing social networks have two problems: relevance and monetization, founder Bill Gross argues. There’s a signal-to-noise problem, and there’s no way to monetize that attention unless you send them to your website. What we’ve created is a new interest-based network, he argues.


You can see what we call a “chime-line” on your page, which you can sort by time or by the number of “likes” or the number of comments. 


That way, the good stuff rises to the top, Gross argues. One of the problems with Twitter is that there is no way for me to filter my tweetstream by the most thoughtful or the most interesting, so that’s what we are trying to do with Chime. 


You can also follow people — but instead of just following everything, you can do what we call a “selective follow,” and choose just the topics you want to follow in their stream. So with Robert Scoble, I might want to follow his tech posts but not the ones about his day at the beach, so I can choose to do that. 


We allow anyone — individuals, celebrities, brands — to create a rich-media page and monetize that themselves. So if someone wants to sell ads on their page, the real estate adjacent to that content is his, and 100 percent of the revenue from those ad sales goes to him. If he wants us to sell the ads for him, then it’s a 50-percent revenue share. 

Can Chime solve relevance problem?