ToonMe and ToonApp

Ah, the fun of choosing an avatar for your social media 

there are plenty of offers today - snapchat filters, are pretty amazing

and you must have seen a few avatars already that look cartoonish and it looks like Artificial Intelligence has made enormous progress in face recognition

the result is convincing and so fast

A mobile alternative exists from Lyrebird Studio called ToonApp

A social media that pays you : tsu.co

Talk about coincidence just a few days after I posted "Why an alternative to facebook is needed" mentioning ello.ch as the hot new facebook alternative... tsu.co was launched.

tsu.co

As ello.co motto was about counteracting facebook tendency to sell his users information to marketers - tsu.co goes for the revenue aspect.

Basically tsu.co rises the question to facebook users who are "content creators" (such as artists and celebrities) and ask them this simple question :

"How much money do you directly make by having x followers on your facebook page?"

Because the answer is most certainly : none

You can be a cosplayer like Jessica Nigri and have made nearly 3 Millions Followers and receive nothing from facebook advertising money.

Which is to be fair, a bit like working in an office where all your visitors are buying stuffs from your landlord while they are in the building and you don't make any money (you just don't pay rent).

Or like a radio station that would use many songs and never give any money back to the song artists...

tsu.co is here to mend a fundamental issue on the internet related to content creator and their lack of revenue, they want to distribute some money back to them : the "content creator" - because let's face it, we don't go to facebook to look at an empty website with ads, we are going for the posts of people we follow, or our friend's timeline and to post cool links.

Some facts

Basically what you are doing on facebook, you can do on tsu.co (except they don't have an IRC, or groups, or pages, just tags, and messages) ; the big change is that tsu.co pays you back (and they provide some analytics for the visits).

Best of 2 worlds

Now the smart way to play the social media game is to setup your tsu.co account so it will be used as a proxy to post on facebook - and your twitter account.

The feeling you will have after a while browsing tsu.co is like walking through a shopping mall with people you don't really know. Many people are there to make money, and will send you friend requests, but they mean nothing, the only thing they want is a follow-back, visit their profile and that you will share their posts (because that's more or less how they make money).

Searching on tsu.co sucks, you are not supposed to look back for an old post, but to keep posting and posting (until you have filled your quotas).

Why an alternative to facebook is needed

Why an alternative to facebook is painfully needed

Back in September 2014, a new social media network called Ello made his entry talking about ad-free alternatives to some of the big players of the field (facebook, myspace, etc ...), but more that that Ello promises that the personal information will never be sold to any third parties.

The problem is that viewed from a platform like facebook - a registered user is 'the product' - everything he does is scrutinized, and tracked and recorded so every post that is shared, every friend or every link followed is then sold to advertisers.

Being spied upon is it seems the new trend, the natural way of living with surveillance cameras at every corners of the cities, and where mobile devices are following your every moves...

So when people launch a new social media network that basically says “You are not a product,” its manifesto attracts new people.

The fact that Ello after a few research ended up - being a $435,000 company in venture capital, closed-source code, and a centralized structure appeared to be in contradiction with his pro-independence manifesto.

It just happened not to be what people looking for freedom would be interested in.
Not the anti-facebook we were looking for.

The need is still there, though ...