Tag, you're it

They imitation is a form of flattery. Well, Tsu should be flattered that another new site called 3tags has a practically identical network revenue model.

Like Tsu you earn from views and from those of people you recruit. Unlike Tsu you don't actually need a referral link to join, but I think it's fair to reward whoever let you know about the site.

3tags is not really a social network. You follow tags instead of people, so it's more of a link sharing site than somewhere to post personal updates. You can up vote and comment on posts. I really like that the site is public, so people do not have to join to browse it and posts can be found by the search engines. This is something Tsu does wrongly in my opinion. Walled gardens are a bad thing.

You can include up to 3 tags on each post (hence the name) and people following those tags will see it. I assume up votes will make a post more visible and this will become more important as the site grows. I think this is something like reddit, but I've not used that much.

People will use sites for no financial reward. When there is one they may think it's a scam. I know people are getting paid on Tsu and you don't have to pay to use it, so I don't see a problem.

I've written a few posts that have gained some views and earned me 9c in 3 days. That's a lot more than I got in the early days of Tsu. You can take money out when you reach $25, which seems more achievable than the $100 on Tsu.

Of course I wanted to post my thoughts about this new site on Tsu. It appears they are not fans as any links or mention of the name got me an error message saying this was spam. That looks like censorship to me and that is not good. I'm a little wary as I don't want to get banned. People are discussing this elsewhere, including on a new Facebook group.

From what I've heard both Tsu and 3tags were working on their businesses for several years before they went public, so perhaps the similarities are a coincidence. I'm not sure you can copyright or patent the 'rule of thirds' distribution.

For now I will use both sites, but I will be socialising on Tsu and just posting links to 3tags. I may also post some comments there.

So feel free to use my links to Tsu or 3tags to join up and I'll make a few more cents. Let me know what you think.

Tsuitability

Yesterday Tsu was down for most of the day. I understand they were doing an upgrade, but some combination of circumstances, possibly involving heavy load, took it down. It seemed to be available for brief moments. There have been maintenance outages before, but I'd not seen it down for more than a few minutes.

This is obviously not a good thing for any site. People expect a site to always be available. I do not manage any busy sites, but I would expect there to be contingency plans to switch back to a working system if something goes wrong, but maybe they don't have the resources for this.

I expect everyone took a hit on their earnings for the day. Mine were down to a third of the previous day, but that's no big deal for me, and even the big guns would probably only earn a few dollars less.

I hope this will not deter people. Every business has teething troubles. They say they added more servers. I think they use Amazon S3.

Meanwhile, a new social site called 3tags has appeared recently. Their revenue sharing model seems to be identical to Tsu, but I've seen a report that people have made more per view. It's not a clone. I like that their public posts can be seen without logging in. That's not true for Tsu. I don't know if I will join. I'm lacking on time to play.

Another new site is Synereo. I'm not totally clear on how it will work, but you can currently buy into it by purchasing their 'AMP' tokens that you can use to make your content more visible there. You can buy with Bitcoin, but I don't have the funds available right now. I'll keep an ear out for opinions.

There are many social sites out there, but they have to reach a critical mass to keep going. Nobody wants to go where they won't find their friends or leave a site that already has them. I think it will take a lot to get most people to leave Facebook and Twitter. Those companies are so big that it's hard to see them failing. Mind you, Friendster, MySpace and others lost out, but I don't think they were ever that big.

We live in interesting time. There are no precedents for the modern internet.

Tsulebrities

Please excuse the pun.

Although it's not so important to me I understand a lot of people like to follow celebrities on social media. I know some have many millions of followers on other networks. Tsu did manage to get some big names early on, but not all of these stayed active. I followed people like Axl Rose and William Shattner, but they were not posting anything. I suspect that this partly due to Tsu not having an API that would allow posting updates to multiple networks at one. I don't know what they use to update Twitter, Facebook etc, but I have used IFTTT to update Facebook when I do other things, e.g. post a track on SoundCloud. Celebrities are busy people or they are paying someone to post for them and they won't want to mess around. It is possible to post a Tsu update to Twitter and Facebook automatically. That works okay on Facebook where people will see the whole post, including pictures, links and video, but on Twitter they will just see as much of the post as will fit along with a Tsu link that will only be properly visible if they sign up. This is only of the reasons I do not like Tsu being a 'walled garden'. I want my public posts to be visible to anyone.

There are some active celebrities (major or minor) on Tsu and some of these have followings of around 100,000. I'm not sure that is enough for some of them to hang around when they can get millions elsewhere. The few dollars they earn on Tsu are not significant to them.

Tsu has sprouted its own set of celebrities. One of the best known is Kevin Hinkle. I understand he was homeless, but through posting about health, diet and inspiring people he has earned several hundred dollars in the last few months. His most recent stunt was to write a post to say he would not write any more until that one got 10,000 comments, and it did in a matter of days.

Note that Kevin has a green tick to indicate he is a verified user. Normally you get that if you can link to a verified Facebook or Twitter account. Tsu are offloading the work of checking that people are who they say they are to those networks. I think Kevin knows the Tsu team and was awarded the tick. There are of course lots of fake accounts. I've had friend requests from Mark Zuckerbrg (sic). I don't follow Kevin as I'm not that interested in his posts and I have to focus my attention on what is interesting to me.

Other people have got big by helping people learn about Tsu. Jon Dun is one such. I've had numerous discussions with him. I see he also has a tick.

Tsu does less well than some other sites at suggesting who you should follow. There is a Discover Users page, but it only show verified users and give no indication if they are active. This needs to be improved. Other sites suggest people based on who you follow and what you might be interested in. It's generally difficult to find people on Tsu as the search is limited. Some people are posting lists on Tsu or on their own sites.

I've mostly found people via shared posts or when they write an interesting comment. I have had a few friend requests that I did accept, but the bulk of those are basically spam. I've disabled friend requests for now so I don't have to deal with them. People will have to message me if they want to link up.

I'll write more about friends and followers soon.

If you are thinking of joining Tsu then please consider using my link http://www.tsu.co/steevc. Please leave feedback if you have questions or suggestion.

The Tsu Economy

A lot of the focus on Tsu has been on making money. Various other web sites have played around with this concept, but often in some made-up currency. Tsu uses US dollars, so you know exactly how much it is worth.

One of the issues for most people is that you can only take that money (via cheque or Paypal) when you reach $100 and that may take years. However, you can do other things with that money.

Firstly you can give some to other users. Any user can enable the Transfer Funds button on their profile page. I believe Tsu take 3% of such transfers.

The other option is to donate money to charity. There are a number of charities on Tsu. There have been various donation campaigns that have resulted in some of them getting hundreds of dollars. Of course the charities also earn money from their views and network like anyone else.

There's a list of charity accounts here.

A limitation of donations and transfers is that you cannot send less than a dollar, although some people seem to be able to send smaller amounts. I think there is some potential for small amounts to be used a 'tips', e.g. if you like a picture by an artist or a song by a band you can give them a few cents as you would to a busker or pavement artist. In the Bitcoin world there are sites like ChangeTip that do this.

There are a fair few musicians and artists on Tsu. Some offer the option to buy their work by transferring Tsu funds. As this is money you would not have otherwise it's almost like getting free stuff. Of course you still need to earn enough, but I expect they would all accept other payment methods. It's just that a Tsu transfer is very simple and has a fairly low transaction fee.

I have bought lots of music from bands via Bandcamp as that gets most of the money to the artist. Tsu could be encouraging a similar thing. I think they could go further in allowing artists to register themselves for extra features to allow them to manage orders more easily. e.g. providing a form to fill in order details such as the delivery address.

Tsu make a big thing of wanting to encourage original content. They can help this by supporting the artists better than other sites.

If you are not already on Tsu then please consider joining using my link at http://www.tsu.co/steevc

What is Tsu?

Tsu (or tsū to use the official spelling) is a social network site with some similarities to sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The big difference is that Tsu shares the revenue they get from advertising with their users.

Tsu take 10% of the money to pay for running the site. The remaining 90% is shared amongst the users according to their algorithm. It works according to the views a user's posts get, with some adjustments to take account of comments and like. If it's decided that my post earned a dollar then I gets 45c. The rest is passed on to the people who recruited users. The person who recruited me gets some money and so does the person who recruited them gets a little less and so on. This is the network effect.

So the way to make money is to get lots of views by getting lots of people to follow you and/or to recruit lots of people who write popular posts.

Some people assume that Tsu is a multi-level marketing scam (aka pyramid scheme), but I do not consider it to be one as nobody has to pay anything to use it. All you commit is your time. The advertisers are the only ones paying.

The average person is unlikely to get rich on Tsu, but you can make a little extra money doing what you would anyway. The top people with many thousands of followers are making anything from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars per day. Those who got in really early and built a massive network are probably making the most, especially if they recruited celebrities who would have a large following. I make a few cents per day after building a network of several hundred and have a similar number of followers, but then my network is not particularly active. I post a few times each day and participate in any discussions that interest me. The money is not enough to keep me coming back, so it has to be fun.

A lot of people joined up in the hope of making money and were disappointed when they did not do so immediately. To start with I was making a cent every few days, but that has improved. It takes time and effort to build a following. Some people followed and befriended everyone in sight, but I wanted to make my feed manageable, so I only follow interesting people.

Some people are posting things like pretty pictures and 'inspirational' quotes in a quest for views. This may work, but there could be issues if they do not have the right to post those. Tsu have said they are working on ways to detect copyright violation and those people may find that they do not get paid. Those same people will also like every post they see or post meaningless comments (e.g. 'nice') in the hope that people will follow them, but that doesn't work with me.

You have to earn $100 before you can be paid. Many people have been sent cheques and in the early days they would post pictures as proof. There is also an option to be paid via Paypal. Even if you have not reached the threshold you can donate to the various charities on Tsu or send money to another user. People are offering goods and services that can be paid for that way.

Tsu is by no means perfect. These are some of the things I think could be improved:

• You can only view the site once you have registered and logged in. I think that public posts should be viewable by anyone on the web. This would include search engines and it would allow people to check it out before joining as well as giving lots more views.
• The only privacy levels are Public and Friends Only. Other sites offer more options.
• There should be ways to group people (lists/circles/whatever) so that you can filter the feed.
• Tsu needs some ways to keep new users engaged. It could offer tips and make better suggestions for people to follow. Currently you can just see a list of verified users and I've not heard of many of them and some are not active.
• Related to the above, the site views are decreasing, despite new people joining. They need some mix of marketing and exclusive content to build the site.
• Tsu needs ways to automate posting so that people who syndicate their content across multiple social networks can post there without extra effort. You can make Tsu posts appear on your Facebook and Twitter feeds, but many people will use something else as their main feed. IFTTT integration would help.
• The site needs to be multi-lingual. People are joining from all over the world and posting in all languages. Some of them may not understand how it works if the FAQ is not available in their native language.

If you want to join you need a link from an existing member. I would be grateful of you could use mine to help me build my network. The link you need is http://www.tsu.co/steevc