Available in English Current status End of Life Founded 2009 | Website www.peerpong.com Headquarters San Francisco Number of employees 10 | |
Key people Rogelio (Ro) Choy, Fabien Degaugue Alexa rank 20,054,795 (September 2013) Type of business Question and responses, Social Networking | ||
PeerPong Launched in 2009, they set out to find a better way for people to access expertise across social media. The web service attempted to identify user's expertise by semantic analysis of social networking content (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.)
Contents
History
Originally the service would connect questions posed either through the website or scraped from Twitter with people in-the-know determined by the expertise analysis engine. The premise was that social media content created continually and exposed through services like Twitter could be used to detect expertise that would otherwise be unavailable. The information (signal) that is implicit in user generated content (compared with explicit expertise through blog tags, and self-declared areas of knowledge etc.) may be gleaned using semantic analysis and once ranked may be used to field questions automatically. However, this was poorly received (perceived as spam by many who received unsolicited questions from people they didn't know) and the service switched to a more traditional Q&A website, but ultimately failed to gain sufficient traction in the marketplace amid competition from Aardvark, Quora, Facebook Questions and many others.
Funding
The company raised $2.8 million in a funding round from Doll Capital Management, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures and Partech International.
Current status
As of March 2011, the website and service have been shut down, and at least three of its employees, including Ro Choy, Peerpong's CEO, have moved to Formspring.
PeerPong was based in San Francisco, California.