The Future Of Social Networks

Over the past few days there has been a generous amount of buzz around a new social network called Tsu — an altruistic platform based on the premise that content creators should be the ones profiting from their content, not the networks themselves. Made available to the public Tuesday, Tsu gives 90% of the revenue generated from the content of its users back, along with a portion of the revenue generated by those who have joined with the original users invite code (Tsu explicitly states its not a pyramid scheme in the FAQ).

The validity of this premise from a philosophical perspective is one that is hard to discredit, and a notion that I personally agree with wholeheartedly. If Tsu, or any other platform is able to effectively implement this model at scale (spam & pyramid-scam free) then power to them — we need you.

The interesting thing about the recent media ‘tsunami’ (as put by founder Sebastian Sobczak) is hat it’s tough to detect the quake that triggered it. What spurned the incredibly high profile coverage (e.g., Re/Code, BillBoard, NYTimes), celebrity endorsements, and $7 Million investment by Sancus Capital Prive? Wait Who?

From a quick search of “Tsu.co”, it seems that the buzz was initially generated from a wide-scale team of individual internet marketers, reviewers, affiliate networks, and forum patrons. This includes all sorts of articles and videos with titles like “TSU IS A SCAM! DON’T BE FOOLED! PROOF!”. Unsurprisingly, these turn out to be endorsing the platform and offering up a personal invite code to join the network (not a pyramid scam, promise). These videos are effective from a marketing perspective as they dominate the results for a “Tsu scam” search query.

Is Tsu a legitimate company trying to make an honest difference in the corporate driven social media world?

Maybe so, who am I to judge.

That being said, before we jump the gun and nominate Tsu as the force that is going to make Facebook the next MySpace, and bring justice to the masses of content-creators, lets analyze the product for what it truly is; not a murky guerilla marketing campaign that has drawn many a news outlets to drink its Kool-Aid.

By the way, has anyone ever heard of Sancus Capital Prive?