All About Tip'd

A couple weeks ago a friend emailed me about Tip'd, the new social networking site for personal finance lovers. In was interested in hearing more about it, so I conducted an interview via email with Muhammad Saleem (Mu) from Tip'd's management team. Here's our conversation.

What is Tip'd?

Tip'd is a social news site for the business/finance/money vertical. The site consists of hundreds of users who act as curators and hand pick articles that they deem interesting and important and submit them to the site. The other community members consider all the submitted stories and vote on the ones they like best. The stories that get the most votes are promoted to the front page of Tip'd. The goal of the site is to relinquish editorial control to the community so they can collaborate and build a financial newspaper consisting of the stories that matter to them the most.

Who would be interested in using Tip'd?

Everyone, no matter how rich or poor, how connected or isolated, is affected by the state of the global economy today. The goal of our site is to provide people with one destination that covers all the important news that is impacting you, and therefore everyone should be interested in using Tip'd. Content consumers should be interested in relevant, timely, crowd-curated news, (and participating in the process), and content producers (publishers) should be interested in reaching that highly targeted audience.

How is it different than other social media site such as Digg?

Tip'd is very similar in functionality to Digg, but that's not the important part. However, that's where the similarities end. Tip'd focuses on a single vertical which makes the site more comprehensive, more relevant in the space, and attracts a much more targeted audience. This ensures the audience, the content, and the conversations on Tip'd are much more valuable than those taking place on Digg or any other 'broad audience' social news site. Furthermore, Tip'd is one of the only social news site actually working hard to build relationships with publishers (not just focusing on building a community on our end), to ensure that the needs of the entire community (consumers and publishers) are met.

What other services do you plan on adding in the future?

We plan on making sure the site runs perfectly and all the community's basic needs are met before we start adding new features. We do have quite a few new features planned but we will be releasing information about them on our blog http://blog.tipd.com/ when the time is right. We are always looking for feature recommendations so please don't hesitate to tell us what you think.

Who runs Tip'd?

We have a team consisting of management, a webmaster, a developer, a designer, a community director, a person in charge of blogger outreach, and will be announcing one more person soon. You can read about the Tip'd team at tipd.com/about. Ultimately, we just created the platform and maintain it day to day. The community is who 'runs' Tip'd.

Is there anything else Free Money Finance readers should know about Tip'd?

Tip'd may not be a big player yet but it's growing into that position fast. We need your help and support now so that the site can establish itself and help you in the future. Please contact me if you're interested in helping (partnering) with us.

There you have it. Check out Tip'd and let me know what you think of it. I'd appreciate your insights.

Comments

[Tarah]

This site has good content, but I don't like the fact that you have to get off the site to read an article. I end up seeing something else that interests me, click on it, and five articles later, I realize I'm on a different site and try to get back to Tip'd. It should have the article on Tip'd and a link to the contributing site at the beginning and the end of the article so you can explore it if you want to.

[jim]

While that certainly would be great, I think site owners would be upset if a social network site reprinted content in the way you describe. If you use a browser with tabbing, you can always open it in a new tab window (hold the CTRL key while you kick or click the mouse wheel).

[MoneyBeagle]

Someone should create a plugin to install Tip'd on a Wordpress blog. I'm a very newbie blogger, and want to add Tip'd to my blog. The instructions provide the code that needs to be entered but just says to post it into your 'permalink' or 'single post' file. I have no idea what that is, so I haven't been able to put Tip'd on my site just yet, but I am still looking and will eventually figure it out.