ThisMoment captures personal scenes with a social sheen

Any “moment” that a user has access to view on someone else’s thisMoment site can also be copied (known as “seizing the moment”) onto their own thisMoment page. During beta testing,  “moments” were copied to another site an average of three times. “Moments” can also be embedded in a user’s blog, where they can be viewed in their entirety without having to leave the blog page. New “moments” can also be posted automatically to social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

Other free social media sites have become immensely popular, with millions of users. But it’s still unclear how they will eventually make a profit. ThisMoment will stay free to its users, Broady says, but he sees others sources of income.

One involves licensing the technology behind thisMoment to others. ThisMoment has announce a deal with People magazine, which will use it to help celebrate People’s 35th anniversary. The New York Times will use thisMoment to package its “36 Hours in...” travel features online, making use of the format’s text, photo, and video integration. Road & Track is taking a similar approach to presenting multimedia features on exotic cars.

Eventually, Broady speculates, companies might charge a micro-fee, perhaps a dollar, for users to add an especially attractive prepackaged “moment” or “Momento” to their thisMoment page. Imagine, he says, if the Los Angeles Lakers put together a package on winning the NBA title, selling it as a “souvenir” that fans could put on their thisMoment site.

Advertising eventually will provide income too, Broady says, but only if it can be very targeted and relevant. “If I’m looking at this beautiful day on the beach, I don’t want to look at a mortgage ad.... I want an ad that will help me get there.”

Searches on Google and Microsoft’s new Bing search engines already are uncovering thisMoment “moment” pages, sometimes putting them near the top (and ahead of Facebook) in some searches, Broady says.

“We try to make it really, really simple” to create “moments,” he says. But the result is an elegant platform “for saving and sharing what’s going on in your life.”

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