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File Sharing - Monday, May 16, 2005

Wists - Profile

HQ: New York, NY

Founded: March 2005

Management: Founder is David Galbraith. He is perhaps best known for his work on developing RSS and his work at Moreover with his college buddy Nick Denton.

Investors: Gawker Media's Nick Denton. Funding amount is not public information, however, this kind of venture would carry modest costs.

Business Model: Like del.icio.us, it isn't 100% apparent how Wists will earn a living. The company brings image tagging/bookmarking to the Internet. It wants to merge the distinction between blogging and bookmarking - and make blogging as easy as bookmarking. Next steps include auto detection of where you are bookmarking from and adding appropriate metadata such as end time for ebay auctions. Galbraith says he wants to build in an interface for blog posts that spans times to allow for events bookmarking. For example, "I am bookmarking this restaurant that I want to visit next Friday and invite appropriate people to attend." We recommend a look at Wists' pages to appreciate it.

View - My top 10 Buildings (David Galbraith.com)

Competitors: To some extent del-icio.us

Dirt: Wists joins a growing list of micro-startups that have aims to introduce a new piece of Web publishing functionality. The hope is to attract millions of users virally as soon as possible. Wists enjoys the benefits of the connection to Denton's cool Britannia empire on the Hudson. Just by using Wists across his sites, Denton can guarantee a high level of exposure to Wists. Also, whenever articles in the press are written about tagging, Wists will surely be mentioned. The risk of all this exposure is that the majors might fairly easily integrate Wists' functionality into their products. However, Galbraith, Denton and dozens of other micro-startups are confident that the majors will be slow to catch on until it's too late.