Fuego Nation launches its private beta for rich media social network
Fuego Nation is launching a private beta of a new kind of social network today.
That may not seem like a very downturn kind of thing to do, and Brogan Keane, founder and chief executive, acknowledges it’s going to be tough. But Keane also believes he has a different kind of social network. This one focuses on passions. It’s about the things in your life you care about most or find most inspirational. It’s about showing people what you’re passionate about, discovering others’ interests, and connecting with them.
The site uses rich media such as photos and videos and presents them in an Apple-like way. To discover people you click on the arrows for a photo carousel. If you see a photo of someone interesting, you click on it. The photo flips around and shows you a card that the person has filled out about their passion.
You can send a message to the person. You can also sponsor them. You can play around with 3-D objects. You can offer a status update, but that focuses more on how you feel than what you’re doing at any given moment. The site competes with more general-purpose social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, but it also competes with custom social networking tools such as Ning.
Keane said the San Francisco company has spent much of its time working on its user interface. The idea was to make it more than a photo viewer. The company was founded in December, 2007 by Keane. He got $1.5 million in funding in March and now has six employees. The company is now looking for additional funding. The private beta currently has a small group of just 80 or so people.
I don’t know if these guys will make it. The odds are really long, since they’re so late in getting off the ground, they have a small team, and they have enormous competition. They’re going after a subset of what Facebook and MySpace do. But maybe that’s the point. If they can get people to open up and really express what’s important to them in life, then they could become one of the best dating services in the world.
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About the Author, Dean Takahashi
Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.