'SOCIAL MEDIA HAS BROKEN DISCOVERY'

A NEW personalised entertainment discovery platform backed by Silicon Valley sweethearts has just launched in Australia, with plans to rectify a growing problem with content discovery.

Fresh out of San Francisco, Fabric is the brainchild of tech investor Jon Vlassopulos, who officially launched the platform on Australian shores at Creative3 last week.

It's backed by investors who are also behind companies like Facebook and Pinterest.

If the thought of going through multiple apps and websites continuously gives you anxiety, Fabric puts everything under the one blanket.

The platform helps people discover movies, television shows and music best suited to their taste, by swiping through hundreds of daily-updated content packs. Users can then watch or listen through partners like iTunes, Google play, Netflix, Amazon and Spotify.

Vlassopulos says the idea came to him upon realising companies like Facebook are doing so many things right - but just can't seem to get consumers over the line on the thing that's arguably the most important of all.

He estimates that Facebook's data on items that fall under your interests like music, films and sport is on average 7 years old because users don't derive any real benefit from updating it.

"Everyone is producing more and more amazing content and entertainment and only recently it's almost grown exponentially from four networks, to 40 networks, 400 networks, soon there will be 400,000 networks," says Vlassopulos.

"For that reason, we feel discovery is broken at the moment."

Vlassopulos says algorithms are doing a fine job at evolving and keeping up with all of the new data being logged online, but there's a fundamental problem for consumers.

"Algorithms include a lot of co-mingled data, and just because your husband or friends liked something on social media, doesn't mean you will feel the same," says Vlassopulos.

"The whole notion of reviews and recommendations was good for a while, but businesses like Yelp in the States are at the moment in their death spirals because people are realising you just can't trust the person that's voicing their opinion, or trust that you will feel the same - not everyone has the same tastemaker.

"I'm also fascinated by social science and matchmaking, so there's that interplay that Fabric could also rise to."

Fabric's aim is to improve discovery and make it 'more human and personal'.

"We're moving away from the ever-present social graph into a taste graph," says Vlassopulos.

"If you like a musician, movie or television show for example, you like it with a quick swipe on your Fabric profile, and we match you with other entertainment products you may like according to people with similar interests to you.

"It's simple - and I think the next wave of tech platforms after those like Twitter, Spotify and Netflix will be the platforms that bundle everything together under the one banner because it just makes more sense for busy people."