SodaHead’s Jason Feffer On Becoming a “Social Newspaper”
SodaHead said last night that the firm is switching from its Q&A focus to become a “social newspaper” site. I asked Jason Feffer, the firm’s CEO, three quick questions about the switch, and thought I’d share it here:
Why the switch to the new “social newspaper” idea?
SodaHead.com evolved into the best place on the web for people to express, discover and connect their opinions. SodaHeads – as we affectionately call our members – blog and ask questions regarding breaking news and the hottest topics of the day. Like, “Do you support Obama’s government-funded health care?” or “Can MySpace make a
comeback under its new CEO?” SodaHead evolved into a social newspaper as a result of this user behavior and we are continuing to develop our site to foster this type of interaction.
What’s going to happen to the polling Q&A parts?
Q&A will not go away on SodaHead – quite the contrary. News expands the Q&A portion of SodaHead unlike any other site. Once a story gets submitted, SodaHeads can add their questions and blogs to that story. This makes the original core Q&A functionality more engaging and substantive by associating with News, and it makes News far more dynamic than any other site.
For instance, one SodaHead may post the story, “The Beginning of the End of Private Health Insurance” from Reason.com. Another SodaHead then asks the question, “Would Publicly-Funded Health Care Require Legislating Behavior?” and associates it to the News story.
Q&A will continue as it has for nearly half a million questions and nearly 20 million answers and comments before we added this feature. So people will still ask, “USC or UCLA?”
Does this compete against things like Digg, etc. or where do you
see this going?
SodaHead and Digg differ in many ways – we don’t consider SodaHead a social bookmark site. SodaHead doesn’t exist to make a news story popular, like Digg does. SodaHead’s large and diverse community extends the news and fills the void created by traditional news publishers by allowing people to actively engage in the news, learn from each other and connect in ways other sites cannot.
