Health Social Networks

MDJunction doesn’t look like any other WEB2.0 site. It looks like something taken from the 20^th century…

‘Back in the days’ when we started looking at what’s out there I ran across MDJunction, noted that it was relevant but didn’t look like anything that would stick and moved on. About a year later their name came up again, it still didn’t look like something that would stick but… it was bigger. Looking at them now, I still don’t get it – but it’s BIGGER!

So what is MDJunction? It’s DailyStrength only smaller and not as trendy looking & feeling (anyone say 20^th century??)

BUT the funny thing about it is that now (and it did take me almost two years) I realize that there is a place for this kind of social network and at the rate they seem to grow* I think that they are proving it. Not everyone is looking for a WEB2.0 design before they join a site, most sick people don’t go to TechCrunch to find a recommendation for a support group and THAT MIGHT COME AS A SURPRISE but people get sicker as they get older and well… older people are 20^th century ;-)

While DS is the big multi-chain world-wide Supermarket, MDJ is the local grocery store. I’m not sure what the statistics are on this but I have a feeling that at least 50% of the people still like shopping at the tiny store 300ft from their doorstep that feels like home. THAT IS what the people in MDJunction do so elegantly – it feels like home more than any of the other sites on my list of Health Social Networks .

I decided to put it to the same test I did with DailyStrength. Searched for bipolar (in their search box) and got a… google result for their Bipolar Support Group. A little more than 2,000 group members (DailyStrength - 12,700), 17 of them were online. The discussion bulletin seemed very active, people were also publishing diary posts (some kind of blog?!?). Nice. Again – not as big as DailyStrength, but still full of people And they all seem to be hugging each other…. Is that legal?

Second test, same as DS: Complete Blood Count. NOTHING RELEVANT ;-(. Well… I’m not going to delete my WebMD bookmark yet….

Three paragraphs up I wrote “at the rate they seem to grow*” the reason for the remark is that my estimates regarding their growth are purely based on what I see when I look at their site from time to time. There is really not much info about these guys and as far as I can tell no real funding round up until now. Again – I’m guessing. It seems that the founders (I do know that their names are Roy & Alon) are really shy… no PR, no interviews, no effort for blogger presence and I haven’t seen any of them in conferences and so. Do they really think they can keep growing and become a dominate force while staying so far away from the scene? I don’t… and I don’t like offering people to do an interview and not get any response!

One last thing before I get to my final words. It is not very welcoming to be assigned a default image that looks like a no face, depressed cartoon. It’s horrifying and totally contradicts what you’re trying to build here.

The Good:

1. Feels like home.
2. Keeps surprising me.
3. Most of ‘The Bad’ bellow can be improved with modest funding. Funding (for those who forgot) relates to money, something we used to have.

The Bad:

1. DailyStrength.
2. NO marketing strategy what so ever.
3. Their graphic designer needs to GO HOME or at least surf the web a bit….

TechCrunch wrote about a new company in our niche - weare.us


personally i don't give them the slightest chance....
but TC wrote about them, i wonder why?!?!?

you HAVE TO read what Doug Hirsch wrote about them in one of the comments there ;-)

and.. just as a courtesy to TechCrunch I'm updating my list of Health Social Networks to include them too.

Well we all saw this coming in the last few months but even so it is shocking. Waterfront Media buying Revolution Health valuating the company at around $100 M, meaning all the hard work put by the top executives in the field (Steve Case, Colin Powell; Jim Barksdale, Frank Raines & Carly Fiorina) yields a $-0.50 on the $1 return… OOppppsss.

I’m having flashbacks of Mercata & Paul Allen (he also talked about a revolution back then) is it 2001 again?

How can we explain this?

Is it the falling economy? Hubris – one man trying to take over a whole vertical? Excessive acquisitions? Or maybe just the troubling fact that this market is not as big as we once thought?

DailyStrength are in financial troubles and had to cut back dramatically after failing to raise additional funds, iMedix declared they are about to close big $$$ funding about a year ago… and so many others are making disturbing noises you just can’t ignore anymore. Will my list of Health Social Networks going to be half the size in one year? Maybe less (time and long…).

Did it ever make sense to seed fund a niche social network website with $7M (DailyStrength) or even $4.5M? (WellSphere who seem to be using the money to change the UI and who they are every 3 months…). Wouldn’t it make more sense to give the entrepreneurs $1M and send them off to prove there is a business hiding somewhere around here? No wonder no one wants to invest in this market now. Hey – Steve Case lost $100M isn’t this enough ????

The only chance is in finding the business and all I see is advertising (and mostly google adsense), that can work for a small company with low overheads and a really laid back investor …. How many of these have that? if I had to bet, I’d put my money on those who raised moderate amounts and managed to gain some strength. Inspire, MDJunction and maybe Trusera (not sure about the strength part here) have the highest chance to keep their heads above water in the next 12-18 months.

Looking back at M&As in the market doesn’t explain these investments either. HealthTalk and CarePages might have done nicely, but that was Revolution at its best. Other than that not a single outstanding acquisition and if anyone here thinks they are going to be AOL’s next bebo and sell for $850M, you forgot to take your pills today.

I don’t think I ever wrote something with so many question marks before, but I guess that’s just how I feel about your market right now. Come on over everyone, there’s plenty of businesses in IPTV ;-)

Sam

You probably realized by now that I'm a big fan of the Health Social Networks gang. I'm an advocate and a strong believer, but that doesn't mean I like everything that's being done…

I don't really like iMedix. I know I'm not the first to say that and bigger bloggers have done so in the past (iMedix combines health search and community — but does neither well, iMedix: Social search that creeps me out ) but I just have to get it out of my system.

I first heard the name at the 2007 Crunchies when they were announced as Best new startup. I got to tell you a lot of heads moved at that announcement. Could it be such a wonderful company with so many fans but none the less nobody in the audience ever heard of them?? I mean the 'Best new startup' is a minor trophy at the Crunchies, but not that minor. Later that day I got the chance to listen to the entrepreneurs talk to the media. I have to say that I liked them. They seemed eager, energetic and with that 'spark' in their eyes everyone talks about. But is that enough?

Every time I log into iMedix I get the feeling that there is really nothing there.

The search results are OK and even if I let the beer get too much to my head and say it's a little better than google (it's not, but let's just play) would anyone remember to visit that site and not go for the BIG G to look for stuff??? It doesn't work like that! and that's not even the problem…..

iMedix homepage says "Members of the iMedix community help each other by sharing their experiences". That is not what I see there. Trying to get someone to talk to you is hard, you're most likely to find yourself talking to an iMedix employee, an eager teenager or just someone like you who's trying to find others who know something about his condition (which is not the info you are looking for…). There is no collective data, no shared experience and well… nothing really. Can you even compare this to a visit to DailyStrength or Medhelp? No way.

I visited the site 3 times yesterday, hours apart. On all 3 visits to the home page under “Featured Questions” (you’d think they’d be special) I got a question that was actually an email address this got my curiosity flowing and I clicked on the ‘Featured Question’ to find that the meaningful question (only an email address of someone who is probably a spammer) was answered twice by ….the same guy. Needless to say that the answers are not any better than the question. I got that at 3 out of 3 times during the day!!

Is this the activity you’d expect from the Best new startup of 2007, 10 months after voted as such??

I wasn't going to give up on my research there. After all they did win a prize. I checked them out in Alexa and Quantcast.

At first glace their alexa graph was about to change everything I thought. It's growing. Tremendously…. but hey… have you ever seen a traffic surge that looks like that? My only guess would be paid traffic. You pay - people come, budget runs out - they don't. There is nothing wrong with buying traffic. It's legal. Everyone does it and it works in many cases, provided you paid for quality traffic…. scrolling down the page (still alexa) I might have gotten a clue on the quality of the traffic. 3 Month average page views: 1.25. that's right folks – an award winning social network with 1.25 page views per visitors. DailyStrength shows 7.79, PatientsLikeMe 5.9 etc'

So we know alexa isn't always right. I checked my favorite Quantcast. The picture here is a bit different. It looks like the sites' share of visits has been going down for almost 4 months now (same as compete estimates) and not as moody as alexa shows, but the interesting part is on the right side. Quantcast has two 'related' sections on the right side (Audience Also Visits, Audience Also Searches For) each of them with 15 items/sites. I consider it highly accurate and often use it when searching for companies. Out of 30 sites and keywords listed NOT A SINGLE ONE is related to health, social networks or iMedix in general. If you do the same check for most of the sites in my Health Social Networks List the ratio is 28 out of 30. I'm not really sure what that means but I know it ain't good ;-)

Final words

The Good:

1. Eager entrepreneurs.
2. UI looks professional and friendly.
3. An amazing seed funding that enables a lot of PR.

The Bad:

1. I couldn't find any value.
2. The data on traffic monitoring sites looks unflattering.
3. The 'beta' tag. If you're live for more than a year and still consider yourself beta something is not going right.

I wish the people in iMedix the best of luck and I would truly be happy to see them thrive (as I said they do look like nice people) but for now – I think iMedix is just not going anywhere.

dLife is the first of the niche social networks I’ll be covering and there is a good reason for that – it's a great site!

Disclaimer – I don’t have diabetes, don’t wish I had it, don’t plan on getting it later in life and I know very little about it. Now that we’ve done that lets look at the site.

dLife look and feel is a combination of a friendly looking homemade site (MDJunction) and the pro Web2.0 stylish ones (OrganizedWisdom). It is balanced and beautiful and makes me really want to check it out.

Inside it is full of tools and features to control your diabetes and live a better life.

You can read and share Diabetic Recipes, join forums to discus experiences with fellow diabetics, read the many pages with pure info, ask your questions and get answers from experts FOR FREE! And there is even a section for ‘Tips for Smart Diabetes Shoppers’. The flow of the site as the UI suggests is friendly and welcoming and I found it easy to navigate (a big problem with social networks today).

dLife was founded in 2004 and if you’d look at their Advisory Board list you’ll find many well known celebs from sports medicine and a lot of TV (and yes they also have their on dLife TV).

I couldn’t really test the quality of the content and tools of the site (as I said I know nothing about it) but from a technical marketing point of view – it’s a very nice site, I’m just not very clear on how the ____ are they going to monetize it, cause the ads they are running now will probably not even pay for the water supply.

Final words

The Good:

1. I love it – it’s a great looking site.
2. Serious people with serious money behind it.
3. Very close to becoming a portal for diabetes – good for them.

The Bad:

1. How are they going to pay the bills?
2. While browsing I got the feeling it was not as crowded as I’d expect it to be.
3. Niche but busy surroundings – SugarStats & TuDiabetes are there too!

Will I go there if I had diabetes? Sure

The people rest their case.

I just found (about two months late) a great review of Google Health by Matthew Holt from The Health Care Blog.I think it's well worth the time. http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2008/06/google-health-.html

Enjoy,
Sam

DailyStrength is a great social network for health and by its own description ‘
the Internet's fastest growing health-focused social network’.
So – what is all about?
More than 500 different ‘support groups’, thousands of people who come everyday to talk to other likeminded people, set goals, get advice from people just like them and see who else shares the same treatments and therapies … friendships, journals stories from health professionals and more and more….
DailyStrength (aka DS by its members) came to light late 2006 with a burst of energy. Founded by top executives from Yahoo (dealing directly with Yahoo communities) and funded by RedPoint ($5-7 Million) they recruited VPs with long bios, got all the necessary PR from the top tech bloggers (anyone say TechCrunch?) and didn’t miss a single Health-Internet-Technology conference. But they didn’t stop there – they worked! DS is an active thriving community (more than 300,000 monthly visitors according to Compete.com) with many addicted members active forums and good spirit. I think everyone needs to take a look!
I put it to the test: searching for bipolar I immediately landed in their support group and was overwhelmed. 29 different people were ready to chat with me, 12700 registered members (seemed big but not that much) a forum post every 3 minutes on average – what more can you ask for? They have more…. Blog posts by a Dr. Orrange (a smiling Dr. who by her profile is feeling Good…), people giving hugs to each other (kind of made feel like everyone already knows the others – what about me ?? ;-) and some info on the disorder.
Second test: Complete Blood Count. Search got me to the High Blood Pressure Support Group. The groups looks really nice (like the bipolar group but smaller) but I just couldn’t find any information to help me with my blood count results… I’m sure that if I’d stay there for another hour or two, ask questions and look real good under all the forum topics I would eventually find some info about the blood test, but hey@!@ this is the internet I want answers now!
Final words
The Good:
1. A huge website with lots of members.
2. Great source for support and finding likeminded people.
3. The Internet's fastest growing health-focused social network (I just love marketing slogans).
The Bad:
1. Missing some personal touch. I have no idea how you can do it in such a big website, but I expect a site this big to know.
2. Some of the regulars are complaining that because it got so big they are having manageability problems. I didn’t notice it for myself but heard some say that.
3. There is nothing spectacular or really exciting about the site. I know some people will look at this and say – what the ____ do you mean… but what I am trying to say is that if you’re such a great site (and it is) and you have so many members (they do) and you say you are the fastest growing (they say) I expect something extra, some feeling of excitement like the first time I joined facebook. There is nothing wrong with just doing what you do and doing it good – but I want more.
As for dominating the Health Social Networks vertical? I’m not sure. I think MedHelp are bigger and I also think MDJunction is about the same size, one thing is for sure: DailyStrength is big and powerful.
One last note: two weeks ago I wrote a post about DailyStrengths’ financial problems. Some people wrote me to say that I was just trying to harm DS – this was not the case, I love the site ( I would like to interview them soon) and I wish with all my heart for them to find additional funding and to continue to grow so fast. I just found out the news and thought I needed to share it.
Peace & Love to you all, Sam.

OrganizedWisdom is indeed an organization bursting with wisdom.

Health Social Networks started appearing in 2006 when 3-4 sites pioneered the vertical with a lot of PR. OrganizedWisdom was one of them. Despite the fact that they launched with the wisdom cards already at the front it was really hard to understand what OW was all about, especially because it was mostly a social network and how does a wisdom card relate to social??

Only a year later that I fully understood OrganizedWisdom, it happened when they rebranded the site to social search – now wisdom cards make sense.

Did they plan on doing it this way? I don’t really think so. I believe it was a real time change adapting to the market that became a bit too busy. I love companies that know how to do that.

Today OrganizedWisdom is both the leading search engine in the health vertical and also a great company run by veteran entrepreneurs (I hope to have an email interview with them soon) relaying on the very popular work-from-home concept. People write wisdom card from home (social), Drs verify the cards from home. They maintain a forum to support the work on the wisdom cards (as apposed to the other sites on our list that do it for the patients) and manage to grow so nicely without the overheads of a large office and crew. Managing this sort of operation and doing it so nicely is something to be proud of.

And the real life tests:

I started off by searching for bipolar disorder as this is something I know about.

Auto-complete saved me from typing the whole thing (it was the first option after typing bipo) – I know its nothing special but I love that ;-).

I got the Bipolar Wisdom Card which is managed by Chris Miller. Don’t know who Chris is but she knows a lot about a lot of things (more than 100 wisdom cards on different topics and areas).

The page starts off with a short description about the disorder followed by a few facts. I even learned that some people may be categorized as having bipolar NOS - Not Otherwise Specified, I wouldn’t leave the doctors office if he told me that). I did some checking to find out it was taken from wikipedia, too bad there was no mentioning or credit for it on the page.

The page continues with news, more resources, symptoms, causes, treatments and more.

All in all the card is full of knowledge and resources and would be a great place to start if I were writing a school paper, it lacks some personal touch that a bipolar patient would definitely be looking for.

Second test, Complete Blood Count. Lets say I just got the test results and wanted to know what my status is:

This time the card was BINGO!

Short description was accurate.

The card contained all the links a person needs to find out everything about his blood count.

It would have been nice to have the different measures on page but having all the resources listed is good enough.

Final words

The Good:

1. Great company with a great website
2. Unique and powerful solution.
3. Your source for health related resources.

The Bad:

1. Missing some personal touch.
2. paying for content is not really social networking
3. wikipedia

and to the question in the title: NO

I don’t think OW will change the world, but its here to stay and I love them for it!