[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
Typically, yet another social network raising funding wouldn’t catch me off guard. But when that funding is a fresh $29.6 million (and a total of $55.6 million) and I’m not immediately familiar with the name of the company, something seems afoot. As VentureBeat reports, the company taking on all this money is a social network called Moli.
Poking around Moli, it looks like a fairly standard social network, with user profiles, friends lists, comments, and popular widgets like Slide. Traffic, at least according to publicly available data, isn’t anything special – Alexa ranks the site around #87,000 worldwide, while Compete counts just 48,000 visitors in December.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
So what is the unique angle of this site? Judy Balint, president and COO of Moli, is quoted with the following in the company’s press release:
"Moli is a next-generation social media community allowing members to manage multiple profiles from one account. It is designed for enterprising individuals entering that next major lifestyle change, beginning in the late twenties, when control over personal privacy is a more compelling issue."
Admittedly, this is a big problem of social networking today, but both Facebook and MySpace have openly stated they are working on features to allow users to manage privacy settings to grant different access to the different groups within their personal social network. Given most of your friends are on one or the other, privacy settings alone don't seem like enough to cause a mass migration to an upstart like Moli.
Moli is part of a company called Mainstream Holdings, Inc., which is founded by the Christos Cotsakos, the former CEO of E*TRADE. The investors aren’t typical names you’d associate with a massive Web 2.0 funding – two of the main backers are former Home Depot execs Bernard Marcus and Kenneth Langone.