I see dozens of widgets in any given week. Of those dozens, I look at maybe 3 or 4 of them. When it comes down to actually adding one to the blog, the number shrinks by an order of magnitude. Siphs, an “email this” widget that I recently had the pleasure of running across is a notable exception.

It adds easy to use, convenient email functionality to your blog posts along with giving you statistics to track how people are sharing your content. So far, it has been a joy to use.

I had a chance to talk to Arpan Jhaveri, one of the founders of Siphs. Here is what he had to say.

Siphs

me: Tell me what Siphs is.

arpan.jhaveri: sure Siphs current offers three services (I’ll get into the evolution of each) the initial service, SiphsPost is a much more convenient way of email/forwarding links to friends and colleagues. Tom, the other founder and I were basically frustrated with sending links and associated notes via email. We hated opening up our email clients, and more than that we hated trying to find the previously sent links through the hundreds of emails that clogged our in-boxes. This service makes it more convenient to private share links and notes with one or more people w/in your address book. Questions?

me: My main question for that one would be what do you think differentiates you from other similar “Email This Post” widgets?

arpan.jhaveri: The second service, a LinkBlog is an extension of the first we’ll get to that in a bit. There are quite a few difference between us and “email this post” widget

1) Email-this-post widgets require you to remember the email addresses of the people you want to send a link to you can synch our service with your address book (gmail, yahoo, outlook) etc . . . so that these addresses are presented to you when you go to send the link (AJAX auto-suggest as you type)

2) A consequence and limitation of the email-this widget is that as a user, it’s not as easy to send to a group of people - you have to remember, and type all the email addresses out and - most of the email-this forms limit the number of people you can send to. To simplify this - you can group your contacts on Siphs by tag/keyword and use the keyword as an email list to post links to that group then, from your siphs.com account, you can quickly get a list of links you sent to a group by clicking on the group (again keyword) you used to send the post to, or if you want to see all the links that you sent to me, for example, you could just click on my email address. We think it’s a much simpler interface for users, and we’ve found that our users are more likely to share information with their friends or colleagues by using Siphs.

me: Interesting concept. It is something like an ad hoc social network around links.

arpan.jhaveri: Yes, very much so

me: Since you do offer the ability to send emails to a large number of people at once, are you at all concerned about the potential for abuse and spam?

arpan.jhaveri: We aren’t actually concerned with spam issues for several reasons when you add someone to your address book, we send that person a notification saying that they have been added. We then give that person the option of either

(a) blocking all email from you, or

(b) blocking all emails from any siphs.com member

so there are safeguarding in place to limit abuse we also regularly check on aggregate usage statistics to flag potentially abusive behavior, and include a captcha image to ensure that the system can only be used by a human.

Another interesting aspect to service is that the “embed” code that other sites provide can be pasted into the form - so other siphs users who receive your can, from their siphs account view the content.

me: Excellent safeguards. Do you find that people are more interested in receiving links and the like by mail than they are through Social News sites like Digg or Stumble Upon?

arpan.jhaveri: There’s a slightly different user bias here - each of the services you mentioned (at least to my knowledge) only permit public sharing and in addition, the intent of the user is more to “vote” for a given link or webpage. I’m a user of stumbleupon to vote on pages, but I rarely send those to friends users, we’ve found, are only likely to forward a link to another if they believe the other party finds some real benefit to it.

We think it’s a much higher quality recommendation and that the tools are complimentary rather than competitive to that end, we do have users who use del.icio.us, et all and use our service on regular basis.

me: You said that you had another, complimentary service to this one. I am interested in hearing about that.

arpan.jhaveri: Sure - the next service is a public link blogging service, this functions very much like like a traditional social bookmarking service. The first service we just spoke of, allows users to post links privately. This service extends that by allowing them to post publically, and in addition - provides them with the ability to add custom widgets their public page. You can see there that I have added my own image, and a meebo widget to the right hand navigation. These public links come with their own RSS feed and embeddable widget so they can be distributed around the web, or integrated into life streaming sites, etc

me: So this is more of a lifestream of semi-public links?

arpan.jhaveri: The link-blog is a stream of links that a member posts to his or her public profile like a blog, other users can add comments and engage in discussion around any publically posted link.

me: Interesting. Do you see other “micro-blogging” services like Tumblr as competition to this idea?

arpan.jhaveri: We do see it as competitive, however, its something many of our users wanted and as a user-driven organization, we were happy to oblige. Ultimately, it’s the users who determine the direction of our services.

me: Interesting that you should say that. How do you sort through your feedback to decide which ideas are good and which ones won’t provide any value?

arpan.jhaveri: Most of the suggestions come via email to support@siphs.com. Every two weeks or so we compile all the suggestions and then solicit feedback from other members to get their input and then move forward.

me: So tell me a little bit about that third product you alluded to earlier.

arpan.jhaveri: Great - this is service that Tom and I recently launched are are particularly excited about. It’s an “email-this” widget for your site/blog with a twist. Too many of the email-this-widgets don’t send branded emails. Why shouldn’t small publishers and webmasters be able to send branded email just like the New York Times or any other large publisher for that matter. Large publishers routinely insert additional content, and images within the email-this links they send. We thought - lets level the playing field and let everyone else do the same.

Users simply add our email-this widget to their site, and then through their siphs.com account, and w/o any technical knowledge, customize the look and feel of the email to match the look and feel on their site, and can through a html-editor, add their own custom content. In addition to the branding, each user gets daily, weekly, and monthly statistics on what’s being shared. You can find a good example of this on url shortening service snipurl. You’ll see that the form matches the sites branding. I you send yourself the link, you will see that the email matches the branding as well. Note that the emails we send out for this service are mult-part emails. We send both the HTML version and the text version, this allows users for mobile devices, such as blackberries, to display the text version.

me: That’s really great. Tell me, what has been the hardest part about starting a business from scratch?

arpan.jhaveri: I think the hardest part really depends on the teams strengths and weaknesses, which is why it’s important to create a well rounded team for us, it’s been getting up to speed on the basics of marketing and finance since neither Tom nor I have had any direct work experience in that area. We really had to sit down and learn quite a lot to put this together, and that in and of itself - the broadening of our respective skills sets and knowledge is probably one the best things about this whole process
plus we thing its a lot fun.

me: How are you finding the process of getting people to try out your widget?

arpan.jhaveri: Its been harder than we thought - most people assume that their email-this widget is just fine, but when they see our service in action, when we actually sit them down and show them how the branding and stats differ, its not too hard an argument to make. Unfortunately - we haven’t had a seeding event that would really highlight what we are doing, but we’ll keep plugging away one new convert at time.

me: So tell me, how are you planning to monetize this service?

arpan.jhaveri: The first two services we discusses are 100% free and will always remain so. The branded email-this widget is a subscription based offering. We’ve been able to get a small number of paying clients and definitely hope to keep growing that number as best we can.

me: Where do you see your product in 1 years time? Do you plan to evolve this idea, or are you progressing towards something else entirely?

arpan.jhaveri: For the time being our efforts are focused on building awareness of our offerings. We certainly see it involving to better map to mobile devices. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity in the shift for notebook computers to mobile devices and we will be evolving our idea to better fit the needs of the mobile handset market.

me: Great. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me Arpan!

arpan.jhaveri: no problem - thank for interviewing me! it’s been my pleasure

Web 2.0 Roundup

If you haven’t had the opportunity yet, I highly suggest trying out the Siphs button at the bottom of this post. If you like it, be sure to grab one for your own blog. Thanks again to Arpan for taking the time to speak with me.

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