Your Truman Show Changes Tack

Your Truman Show, which previously launched a personal video sharing portal and then a video-sharing Facebook app and widget called VideoMap, is now going after a different market. Today the company a announcing its new, yet-to-be-released product called Taglift, a collaborative filtering program aimed at ad networks.

Taglift is based on lessons learned from VideoMap, which tried to display relational information between people and videos. The product itself isn’t supposed to roll out until fall. I’m a bit skeptical since Your Truman Show didn’t have much success with its other projects — its Facebook app has an average of nine daily active users, total. But perhaps changing to a business-to-business model will yield better results.

By collecting free, public information about user behavior like favoriting and embedding videos, Taglift aims to make connections about related videos and sell that to ad networks so they can better target their ads. The company has indexed some 15 million videos already, but it doesn’t have any customers yet.

Your Truman Show COO Matteo Fabiano told NewTeeVee YTS is spending 80 percent of its resources on the new project. The company has raised a tiny bit of additional money, for a total of $1.6 million raised.

Other collaborative filtering startups include Loomia, Aggregate Knowledge and Taboola, but their target customers are media and e-commerce sites, not ad networks.