Entrepreneurs: Jane Smorodnikova
by Miki Saxon
Jane Smorodnikova, founder and CEO of LikeHack, is a client of mine.
When we first met in January she told me that she started the company out of desperation when she found herself drowning in information.
Everybody knows that there is just too much information out there, but people can’t (won’t) stop reading their social media because they have to stay in touch with the industry and people they follow and I am no different. I was constantly checking my Twitter updates and wasting valuable time on useless information and that was the inspiration for LikeHack—I needed to stay in touch and still be productive. During my recent trip to Boston many people, from designers to investors, said they needed it, too, and now I see them among our users.
Jane is a smart, talented, serial entrepreneur (four companies and counting) located in Moscow, Russia.
Social media isn’t my thing, but those I know and work with see it as both boon and bane; research shows that active users receive around 284 stories everyday, but read only ten.
That’s a lot of chaff to plough through to find the wheat.
A healthy lifestyle means not only eliminating junk food from your body, but also getting rid of mental junk food, AKA useless content. For some, entertaining themselves by chatting, skimming and looking at funny cats on social media makes sense, but many of us use Twitter and Facebook as a content source for our professional lives. We designed LikeHack so people could receive curated content from people they trust.
So what exactly does LikeHack do?
- It filters the clutter from your social media stream to give you a digest of interesting stories using the magic of crowdsourcing by like-minded people;
- takes the complete history of shared links and builds a filter utilizing similar people who like the same links from the same sites as personal content curators;
- adds full text search to all the user’s content, including incoming content and all stories that were ever liked, shared or tweeted; and
- supports Facebook, Twitter, Gmail (to collect links shared via e-mail), RSS, as well as importing Google Reader history, while future versions will include LinkedIn and Google+ integration.
And in case you’re wondering, I do content development and write, including the scripts for videos like this one.
Image credit: LikeHack
