Called “highly addictive” and “dead simple” by others, Thumb is a social networking service that makes it easy to ask a question and get answers instantly through either the Thumb website or free iPhone app. Recently, AppAdvice had the opportunity to discuss the service with Thumb’s Chief Business Development Officer, Hadley Harris, who discussed what makes his product unique and what he hopes to achieve in the future. By Bryan M. Wolfe.

Background

Thumb, which first launched in 2010 as Opinionaided, is actually more popular than other social utilities such as Pinterest and Tumblr. In fact, users are now spending three and a half hours a month requesting and giving opinions on Thumb, versus visitors who only spend an hour and a half per month on those sites.

To put this into more perspective, Google+ users only visit the site three minutes per month!

One On One

AppAdvice: What makes Thumb different than other services in the marketplace?

Hadley Harris: What makes Thumb different from any other app is that it allows users to interact with many people almost instantly.  If you ask a question on Thumb you will get an average of around 70 people’s opinions in a matter of minutes.  If you try doing that on Facebook or Twitter you will only get a couple responses, if you’re lucky.  What’s even better, once you get these opinions you have the opportunity to connect in a private one-on-one conversation with the people who included comments with their response.  Thumb offers a form of communication that has never been possible before.

AppAdvice: What enhancements to the service do you expect to arrive in 2012 and beyond?

Harris: Unfortunately we can’t share much about what’s in our product roadmap but you can expect us to continue to refine Thumb to give users the best possible way to instantly get and give opinions from real people.  We have some features coming out soon that will allow users to better build an investment in the product over time.

AppAdvice: Who is your target audience?

Harris: Our goal has been to provide a tool to any user that is seeking a high-volume of instant opinions. Currently, we are seeing an audience that skews toward early-adopter, however, we are seeing a trend toward diversification of age and geographic location with a male/female split.

AppAdvice: What are your thoughts on Thumb as it relates to iOS?

Harris: We’re big fans of the iOS platform.  We started with iOS and it continues to be a great ecosystem for us.  Over the next couple months we will be launching quite a few new things on our iOS app, so stay tuned.

To become part of Thumb, visit their website or download their free app today in the App Store.

February was yet another great month for Thumb users…you asked a ton of
great questions and weighed in with your helpful opinions. We’re again
featuring those of you who have been the very most helpful this past month.

We’re rewarding this month’s Overall Top Advisors with Limited
Edition Good Advisor Star T-Shirts and stickers so please make sure you email
community@thumb.it with your address.

The users above are just the handful of Thumb users who achieved the status of
Overall Top Advisor. Check out the full Top Advisors by Category section to see
if you’re featured!

Rule of Thumb

Did you know you can easily filter the topics to see just the categories that
interest you most? When voting, click the “funnel” button on the
top right and uncheck the categories that don’t pique your interest.
You’ll be left with topics with which you can’t wait to engage!

It’s also very important that you enter your correct birthdate. Our
system automagically displays the most relevant content for your user profile,
which makes your experience on Thumb even better. Win-win!

Questions, comments, concerns? Leave your feedback on our Facebook
page…we’re checking it daily as your suggestions help make
Thumb even better.

Also check out Anthony Ha’s coverage in TechCrunch.

Just a few months after the mobile Q&A company Opinionaided rebranded itself as Thumb, it’s already seeing significant engagement gains — so much so that its users are twice as addicted as Pinterest’s.

Thumb is on such a tear that it has managed to tempt one of its own investors away from the cushy life of venture capital. Harris (below), former head of business at Vlingo (which was recently acquired by Nuance) and a founding partner in NYC’s ENIAC Ventures (the initial seed investor in Thumb), is now joining the company in the newly created role of chief business development officer.

“I think they [Thumb] have the opportunity to build something special here… it was a unique opportunity to join,” Harris told VentureBeat in an interview last week.

Harris told me that the Thumb’s users are now spending an average of 3 hours and 50 minutes on its mobile app every month, up from three and a half hours back in December. That’s engagement second only to Facebook. Pinterest, the much-hyped online image sharing site, meanwhile only sees around 97.8 minutes of engagement per month, according to figures from ComScore.

The Thumb app allows you to ask questions and get instant responses from the company’s highly engaged user base. You can also give your opinion on other questions from others. Back in December, users were seeing around 70 responses on average to their questions, a number that’s likely higher now.

It’s simple, but addictive, and that seems to be the key to Thumb’s success.

It was Thumb’s crazy amount of user interaction that sparked Harris’s interest. After he led Vlingo to 10 million users and a “huge exit,” he stepped down from the company and was planning to settle down into the life of a VC, focusing on mobile apps and services. But after serving as an adviser to Thumb (back when it was known as Opinionaided) for years and seeing their massive engagement numbers, he couldn’t help but climb aboard.

“This can scale and become a full-blown social network,” he told VentureBeat, echoing what we heard from CEO Dan Kurani in December. “Opinions are more valuable than interest,” Kurani said at the time, referring to Facebook’s emphasis on user interest.

As head of biz dev, Harris will focus on growing Thumb’s user base. He’ll also be working on strategic partnerships. Brands, for example, could be interested in getting a rush of instant opinions from consumers.

Thumb is based in New York City and has raised around $5.5 million across two rounds of funding.

Check out the latest article in Inside Mobile Apps about Thumb! By Kathleen De Vere

Mobile question and answer service Thumb may now be more popular than Pinterest and Tumblr, at least in terms of the time users are spending on the service every month.

According to Thumb’s latest figures, the average user now spends 205 minutes per month on the opinion sharing service. Compare that to comScore’s latest research on social media use that showed the average Tumblr and Pinterest visitor spent 89 minutes a month on each of the service’s websites. While comScore’s numbers aren’t a perfect comparison because they exclude mobile use, they may mean Thumb’s users are just as engaged as those on the greatly buzzed about Pinterest, despite the fact that the app is still relatively unknown.

For those unfamiliar with Thumb, the service allows users to solicit feedback and opinions based on a picture and short question. It is backed with $5.5 million in capital from SoftBank, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and General Catalyst Partners, and originally launched under the name Opinionaided.

Voters can voice their opinion with a thumb up, a thumb down or a neutral thumb, and have the option to leave a comment if they desire. Users can also choose who they poll with their questions, querying just men, just women or a combination of the two, just their friends in the service or even people from their contacts.

When Thumb launched in July 2010 the company estimated users would get 10 opinions in two or three minutes, but today the average question gets about 70 responses and 10 comments. Thumb’s co-founder and CEO Dan Kurani, tells us about of a quarter of all responses include a comment.

Inside Mobile Apps put Thumb to the test by posting a query about a piece of art to my own moderately popular Twitter account. The Twitter post returned 11 responses in seven minutes and Thumb returned 67 votes and nine comments in the same amount of time, right in line with Kurani’s averages. For users who have fewer Twitter followers, Thumb is by the far the better choice for instant feedback and opinions.

Thumb’s responses were also more balanced, with a 60/40 split between positive and negative opinions on Thumb and 100 percent positive responses on Twitter. According to Kurani Thumb helps eliminate the selection bias (where users only respond to questions they felt strongly about) by not allowing its users to skip questions.

Kurani declined to share the size of Thumb’s user base with us, but did reveal it’s three times larger now than it was in September. Thumb’s demographics are almost evenly split between men and women, but is beginning to trend slightly towards women as it grows. So far the service most popular with users between the ages of 18 to 34, which is to be expected for a startup based on a mobile app.

Although the original impetuous behind the creation of the service was what Kurani calls utility questions (e.g. “I’m looking at these shoes, what do you think of them?”), the other surprise development is Thumb’s users are primarily using the service to make social connections based on their interests.

“The majority of questions that come in are social, like ‘do you like Green Day?’,” Kurani explains. “That’s a social question because unless they’re right there about to buy Green Day tickets, its likely they just want to see if other people who are using the product like Green Day.”

Interestingly enough, although Thumb is turning out to be social service, its growth isn’t being fueled what typically powers social networks — the organic connections between users as they invite their friends.

“We see enough [invitations] for organic growth to go up, but as the brand is becoming more ubiquitous we’re seeing growth through word of mouth and I think that’s partially leading to the uptick in our growth rate,” he says. “You don’t always want to go out to your entire social graph with some of these questions.”

With the pending public offering of Facebook anticipated to be the largest tech IPO in history, it’s an interesting time to think about where we go from here. Some say “social is done,” Facebook is all the social media anyone would ever want or need. Unquestionably, as it nears one billion accounts, in the solar system of social media, Facebook is the Sun — the gravitational center around which everything social revolves.

But while some may pronounce that Facebook is all the social we’d ever need, users clearly haven’t gotten the memo. Instead, users are rapidly adopting new interest-based social networks such as Pinterest, Instagram, Thumb , Foodspotting, and even the very new Fitocracy. (Disclosure: BlueRun Ventures is an investor in Thumb and Foodspotting.)

The numbers tell the tale around users’ appetites for these new interest-based social networks. Pinterest, the increasingly popular virtual pinboard, crossed 10M monthly unique users in the US in January 2012, achieving 8 digits worth of monthly uniques faster than any site ever, comScore says. According to Silicon Valley uber-investor Ron Conway, Pinterest is growing like Facebook 5 years ago.

On Thumb, a community for instant opinions, user engagement has mushroomed in its short history. Users asking questions can expect to receive over 60 answers from other users within 5 minutes. As a result of this near instantaneous community engagement, Thumb’s average usage is currently second only to Facebook’s, and is far ahead of mainstream services including Pinterest and Tumblr, though on a smaller base.

What accounts for the fast growth of these interest-based social networks, and what does it mean for Facebook’s future?

Interest-based social networks have a markedly different focus and approach than Facebook. The Pinterest, Thumb and Foodspottings of the world enable users to focus and organize around their interests first, whereas Facebook focuses on a user’s personal relationships. Facebook offers us a social utility to deepen social connectivity with our existing social graphs, while these new interest-based social networks enable users to express their interests in new, engaging ways and offer authentic, high value connectivity with new people we don’t already know. The different approaches of these interest-based services are distinct from Facebook, and they are powering the massive growth and engagement we are seeing in these new services.

On Pinterest, I can curate and express my interests in Crossfit, cars and architecture, giving me the ability to create a strongly personal identity that draws me into new social relationships with people on the basis of my interests. Similarly on Foodspotting, I can easily express my love for ramen, which in turn connects me with other ramen fans who aren’t in my current social graph.

So if interest-based social networks focus first on an individual’s interest graph and Facebook centers on an individual’s social graph, which service will be the winner?

Both.

Humans are inherently social creatures, and we define ourselves both by the people we know and our interests. We make decisions about where to eat, what to buy, where to visit, etc. based on a complex matrix of social relationships, past experiences, location, long standing interests and future goals. Today’s platforms approach our lives from different angles but both are integral to how we define ourselves and interact with the world around us.

There are opportunities to establish differentiated, sustainable social media brands with large, passionate audiences. Much like the modern day media disrupters (e.g. ESPN or HBO or CNN), these services can establish new social media networks that are differentiated and unique, protecting them from the inevitable concern that they get squashed by Facebook. The traditional “Big 3 networks” (NBC, ABC, and CBS) used to be the only properties that really mattered, similar to how some view Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in today’s social media landscape. Emerging networks will be the new media brands and properties that augment social networking and media.

At the same time, the rise of these new interest based social networks does not really threaten Facebook, in fact, they are more likely to benefit Facebook. Specifically, Facebook has evolved itself brilliantly into not only an end user application drawing near to 1 billion accounts but also a robust, powerful platform other apps can leverage in order to drive more users to their services. Pinterest, Instagram, Fab, and many others have adopted Facebook’s Timeline API for precisely the reason of wanting to raise awareness of their services and drive more users to their sites. As these new services grow, more content gets pumped back to Facebook, Facebook’s platform gets more robust. Wash, rinse, repeat… Facebook’s positive feedback loop gains more momentum, and becomes more powerful.

In the words of Marc Andreessen, “Software is eating the world”, and in the world of social media, there is, for now, plenty of world to go around.

January was yet another great month for Thumb users…you asked a ton of
great questions and weighed in with your helpful opinions. We’re again
featuring those of you who have been the very most helpful this past month.

We’re rewarding this month’s Overall Top Advisors with Limited
Edition Good Advisor Star T-Shirts and stickers so please make sure you email
community@thumb.it with your address.

The users above are just the handful of Thumb users who achieved the status of
Overall Top Advisor. Check out the full Top Advisors by Category section to see
if you’re featured!

Rule of Thumb

Did you know you can easily filter the topics to see just the categories that
interest you most? When voting, click the “funnel” button on the
top right and uncheck the categories that don’t pique your interest.
You’ll be left with topics with which you can’t wait to engage!

It’s also very important that you enter your correct birthdate. Our
system automagically displays the most relevant content for your user profile,
which makes your experience on Thumb even better. Win-win!

Questions, comments, concerns? Leave your feedback on our Facebook
page…we’re checking it daily as your suggestions help make
Thumb even better.

Join us and give a Thumbs Up to a free and open internet at http://americancensorship.org/

Thanks!
Team Thumb