Formspring, the social website that has everyone saying “Ask me anything,” has just closed an $11.5 million round of funding. In addition, they’ve added a new “respond” feature for publishers. The website has blown up since becoming a sensation last year behind CEO/Founder Ade Olonoh.
Formspring currently has 20 million registered users posting 10 million responses every day. Since their launch last year, they’ve hit 2 billion responses. The $11.5 million in funding comes from a group of investors led by Redpoint Ventures.
The Respond feature is interesting, primarily because it doesn’t work as some expect:
To kick off the new year, and show a bit of what is ahead, we’re also releasing a new product today: the Formspring Respond button. The Respond button takes the natural & personal responses people are already sharing with friends on Formspring and extends this experience to the entire Web. This means any Formspring member can respond to any content online, whether it’s an article, a product or a photo.
Basically, you can attach a question to content you post online and readers can answer or respond to that question via Formspring. The weird bit is that responses only show up on that readers Formspring profile.
Rather than using the responses to build a discussion around the content itself, the idea seems to be to draw traffic to the content by leveraging each reader’s social graph. Your responses will show up on Formspring.me and optionally on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace.
via Formspring, TechCrunch