Do you remember Faves.com? Don’t feel bad if you shook your head “no.” This older social bookmarking site formerly called Blue Dot was built way back in 2005, a couple of years after Delicious came on the scene and at a time when social bookmarking was still a hot new trend. After having raised multiple rounds of funding throughout the years, Faves management finally realized they weren’t earning enough money to sustain their team of seven developers. In the fall of 2008, they had to lay off all the full time employees. Only months ago, it seemed as if Faves was on its deathbed – no revenue, no employees – it was sure to fold. But now, just at the last minute, the company received a $75,000 angel investment from Geoff Entress and existing backers, not as much as they had received in the past, but enough for them to get off life support and start planning for the future.
Faves.com Reborn
On the infrequently-updated company blog, the sole remaining employee Mike Koss shared the news about the additional funding, saying it was a “small round” but enough to enable Faves.com to operate for 2+ years, even without increasing the site’s revenue.
He also shared some of the plans he has for the new Faves.com, a site that will no longer be solely focused on social bookmarking in the traditional sense, but will try to increase its relevancy in today’s era of the social web by allowing for integration with Twitter, Facebook, and other services.
Koss also talked about the Ma.gnolia disaster and, in the spirit of full disclosure, wanted to make sure Faves users understood the status of the service. Specifically, Koss noted that Faves exists in a fairly large-scale data center with four front-end web servers and six back-end database servers. Nightly incremental backups are made as well as weekly complete data snapshots, but no recent full-scale data recovery test has been done. He also said that improving site performance and reliability going forward would be one of the challenges he has to face.
On the one hand, it was refreshing to hear Koss speak honestly about where Faves is now and where it’s going, but on the other, it can easily make one feel a little wary of using a service that was only recently gasping for air. That said, as long as Faves.com isn’t your primary service for storing your bookmarks, it’s probably going to be OK to just enjoy using it as the new social utility it aims to become. Now the question is: will you?
