Businesses fill their own company WordPresses with content marketing and press releases. Teens fill their Tumblr pages with diary entries and black-and-white boy band pictures. Wannabe chefs post recipes in the making and glamor shots of their dishes. And yes–writers use their blogs as aggregators of their creative, free and/or professional work.
Social media–and blogs in particular–has the power of making each person with access to the Internet a publisher, but sometimes the Web can be a lonely place. How do we filter through the fray of shared content and bloggers to find reading material and authors we're interested in?
British-Bostonian social blogging startup Glipho is here to help. Glipho is a publishing platform helping users better push out their writing and discover the read-worthy content they're hungry for, all while simplifying the social share process. The company opened shop at 1 Winthrop Square in Downtown Boston in mid-July, with a small sales and marketing team to kick off its stateside growth.
The idea for the "social publishing engine" began in April 2012. At the time, founder and CEO Roger Planes worked as a developer in social media, creating Web tools designed for use by professional writers.
"I thought, why just offer these to journalists and not to everyone else who wanted to write?" Planes told BostInno over the phone.
Planes quit his job, brought together a small team of Web engineers, and opened the private beta version of the site five months later. After a few months of positive feedback and updates, Glipho went into public beta in March 2013.
The platform is best described as a mélange between existing social media sites. You can sign in and start a profile through a pre-existing account like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Plus. Glipho's site does away with the theme feature of common blogging sites, and replaces it with a modern and utilitarian orange, black and grey format. (If the color scheme doesn't suit you, have no fear: Glipho allows you to go into blacked-out focus mode at your "Desk.") Glipho is also syncable to you major social media accounts, allowing one-step post sharing across various audiences.
In keeping with the original vision of the site as a publishing platform, the site requires that all posts contain at least 150 words, dubbed "gliphs." Photos can easily be dragged into a post from the desktop; personal accounts on photo storing sites like Flickr and Picasa, and editing apps such as Instagram, are accessible directly through Glipho. To curate your own content, simply follow other "gliphers" whose material you appreciate. Posts are then displayed in an aesthetically pleasing and Pinterest-y style on the home page. Gliphs are also searchable through 18 different categories and interests, like Fashion & Beauty, Hobbies & Interests, Food & Drink, Science and Politics, as well as via tags or in a search bar.
One of Glipho's biggest differentiators, however, is the "Versions" function—which are essentially comprehensive commentary. Versions allows you to group your opinion on an existing gliph with the gliph itself. A response gliph or "version" can be filed alongside the original, thereby keeping stock of the conversation as well as giving you, and your writing, more exposure. The site provides not only notifications, but also individual's social metrics. From the second the gliph is published, the platform records the number of views, comments, versions, Facebook likes, LinkedIn shares and re-Tweets.
Additionally, the site cleverly includes the ability to import content from other blogging sites, enabling former WordPressers, Tumblists and Bloggr fans to save their work as well as continue to build upon their preexisting blogs–without ever having to leave Glipho. The imported posts are also added to a profile in real-time, meaning that after uploading the older blog post, it will get filed according to its initial publish date (unless the original post is edited and added). This particular function targets what Glipho hopes will be its largest audience–people who are currently blogging, or even managing multiple blogs, and looking to share their posts with friends.
Planes noted that Glipho has also recently debuted Android and iOS apps to let its over 10,000-person user base access the platform on-the-go. Currently, the app only allows for reading access to the site, but Planes noted that the engineering team is working hard on rolling out mobile post ability soon.
About 65 percent of Gliphers are outside of the U.S., with 35 percent coming from the U.K., said Planes. The site brings in more than 300,000 unique page views each month, which, for being open to the public for less than a year, is a fairly strong showing.
With Twitter's new East Coast headquarters in Boston and its upcoming IPO, along with Glipho's new Downtown office, Boston seems to be well on its way to becoming a hub for social media startups.
