Pandia interviews Dave Lu of the new folksonomy site Fanpop. The core concept of Fanpop is social bookmarking, but with an emphasis on community. As it is still in Beta, interesting changes keep happening.

Pandia presented Fanpop in an article last month. We like the site and concluded that it is not essentially a fan site, but rather a place where people with special interests gather in groups to share and rate links, participate in discussions, read news headlines and more.

Pandia has asked Dave Lu at Fanpop some questions about the process so far, how Fanpop will evolve, and more. Welcome behind the scenes of a Web 2.0 startup.

The people behind Fanpop

Pandia: Who are the people behind Fanpop? I am also interested in how you recruited your people and how you all work together. These are important issues in knowledge intensive businesses.

Dave Lu: A team of four of us work on Fanpop. An old colleague of mine, Dave Papandrew, and I met at Yahoo! back in 1999. We became good friends and recently decided to pursue our dream and worked together to start Fanpop. We brought a childhood friend of mine, Cliff Szu, who has a CS degree from Stanford on board as the technical lead.

And I recruited Michael Chu, who has a CS degree from Berkeley, to join the team after seeing his popular cooking website called CookingforEngineers.com.

Dave and I plan and spec out the product and we come up with the user interaction and design. Cliff and Michael are the masterminds behind the code and deployment. It’s been a fantastic experience and joy working with such a talented team every day.

Building online communities

Pandia: What inspired you to make Fanpop and which niche do you see it filling? What, in your opinion, makes you stand apart from other folksonomy sites ?

Dave Lu: I was actually inspired to make Fanpop after I launched a niche website project for Canon Digital SLR cameras last year called EOSrebels.com. Photography is a passion of mine and I felt like there was a lack of resources and community targeted specifically at the growing population of Canon Digital SLR cameras. I basically wrote a few articles, pulled together a list of all the useful links I had found, and put up a forum. I found that there was indeed a demand from the small but passionate population of Canon photographers out there.

This made me realize that there are thousands of similar groups of passionate communities throughout the long tail distribution of niche interests. Dave Papandrew had some great ideas for features and so together we brainstormed how we could create a platform and network for these communities of fans.

We feel like we’re pretty unique from the folksonomy sites in that most of them are strictly bookmarking sites with tags. We actually want to build community-driven portals that include forums and other targeted content like RSS feeds from relevant sources. Our tags are also very specific to each portal, whereas sites like del.icio.us have universal tags.

Fanpop is all about the users and what they’re excited about, so the social aspect is a very important differentiator of our site. Their participation is critical and as such they deserve recognition and a powerful toolset to help them be active citizens of their specific communities.

Obscure topics

Pandia: Fanpop is still in beta. When did you launch the beta, and can you say something about what you have learned since then?

Dave Lu: We just launched the site on August 1. So Fanpop has only been live for two months!

We’ve definitely learned a lot since our launch about what people are interested in and how people interact with the site. We’re fascinated by the number of really obscure topics that people share passions for! I’ve already discovered many new music bands and authors that I’ve added to my reading and playlists.

It’s really amazing how broad the myriad of interests people have are in the world and how much content there is on the web about those topics. We already have over 1,000 spots on the site which is amazing considering we just launched. I’m really excited to see it grow each day with new fans and new topics.

New features

Pandia: Are you planning new functionalities based on feedback from beta users?

Dave Lu: Lots of new features are in the pipeline that we’re working hard on and have been reinforced by user feedback.

We just recently added the ability for users to invite their friends to spots or share specific links. We also launched a bookmarklet that you can add to your bookmarks toolbar to quickly add links and sites to your subscribed spots.

We also just launched RSS feeds starting with new links recently added to a spot, the Fanpop 100 (hottest 100 links across the network), and recently added links to Fanpop. We’ll continue to add RSS feeds to the site so keep an eye out for them!

Sorting out the trash

Pandia: As time goes by, the spots will have hundreds of links – some outdated and some very valuable. How do you prevent valuable links from disappearing in between links to old news stories etc.?

Dave Lu: This is an excellent question! Having hundreds of links for a spot is a problem that we can only hope for. We designed our link architecture to allow users to sort and filter out only the content they care about. The tagging system let’s users easily and intuitively filter out links to see what they want to see.

Another element we offer is that users can categorize content by file type (video, blog, article, etc.). Users can also define if the link will expire for things like events or deals. This will ensure that links that are no longer valid disappear appropriately.

On top of all this, because users can rate links, the quality rises to the top and links that are outdated or poor quality will fall to the bottom. We believe that this categorizing, filtering, sorting and rating will allow the best links to be easily found.

Beating the spammers

Pandia: If Fanpop becomes an authority site, it will attract a lot of spammers. How do you plan to cope with that?

Dave Lu: We don’t think that Fanpop will be very attractive or beneficial for spammers because we use redirects which won’t impact a site’s pagerank. Sophisticated spammers will realize that our site will be useless to them.

However, if people still try to spam, we have a system in place that allows our users to report all spam as well as some automated alerts that detect link spam. We will deal with spam accordingly.

As users gain reputation and earn badges within spots (based on the quality of their activity in that topic or category) they will also have administrative privileges and can manage the links in that spot. We believe that empowering our dedicated users will give them a sense of ownership and pride in their spots and keep them spam free.

On top of that, if they are spam or bad links, the rating system will also push the links down if they are not relevant content that is high quality.

Fanpop as a search tool

So why is Fanpop of interest to Pandia’s readers? Well, it is actually a new type of search directory. Like the Open Directory (dmoz) it is edited by volunteers, and like dmoz it gives you topic lists of relevant sites and web pages. There are significant differences, though. You have to apply to become a dmoz editor — anyone can contribute to Fanpop.

Dmoz has a strict hierarchy of categories. Fanpop is much more flexible and changes all the time. Some categories or fanspots will overlap, subcategories are not marked as such and some topics are missing altogether. We will come back with a more thorough review of Fanpop as a search tool when it is out of beta.

Fanpop as a search engine marketing tool

It is interesting to see that Dav Lu dismisses Fanpop as a search engine marketing tool. And indeed, the site makes use of redirects, meaning that search engine spiders will not follow links automatically. However, if search engines like Google and Yahoo! find that Fanpop deliver high quality links, there is nothing to stop them from making use of Fanpop as an authority site.

Fanpop has included the “real” URL in the “title” tag of the web address, and the search engines may make use of this tag to track valuable links. Whether Google and the rest will do so, remains to be seen.

Moreover, Fanpop can still be used for search engine marketing purposes. Even if a Fanpop link will not carry over pagerank to the search engines, the links themselves may generate traffic and make bloggers aware of your site. So indirectly a Fanpop link may boost your site’s standing.