Keibi, for busting porn on social networks

As social networks grow around the globe and across demographics, so to will the amount of user-generated pornographic images on those networks.

Keibi has a solution: It is launching power tools for porn-spotting and removal. It wants to help social networks enforce the decency standards they promise users and advertisers in their terms of service.  Early coverage of Keibi is here.

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Most social networks employ customer service teams to manually moderate networks. Beyond that, some networks also allow users to report objectionable content, and even have their own rudimentary porn-detecting software in place.

However, the rude content continues to slip in. So Keibi goes further: It scans all images on a social network, analyzing factors such as skin tones, shapes and contours, then ranks each image within a cue, with the most scandalous images at the head and the most innocent at the tail.

The cue is then fed into an interface where customer service reps can pick and delete violators, or pass questionable images to more senior managers to make removal decisions. The software comes with reporting tools so managers can do things like track how quickly and accurately employees pull down problem images.

Certain images, such as revealing paparazzi photos of celebrities, tend to be uploaded by many different users. Keibi lets moderators blacklist or whitelist images for automatic rejection or approval.

One early customer is Piczo, a social network for teens built around sharing photos — and it has relatively strict standards of decency. That company claims that with Keibi, it reviews more than 200 times the images it used to, while spending 70 percent less on “related overhead.”

The service lets any network predetermine the sorts of images they want to filter for.

Myspace comes to mind for its ubiquitously racy images, no doubt a long-time contributing factor to its popularity; It could, if it wanted, choose to be less strict about the images it restricts.

Some sites may have even less use for such automated sanitation. Playboy’s college-student-only social network, PlayboyU, which claims to be free of porn, would presumably not want such software to detract from the anti-censorship rhetoric of its founder, Hugh Hefner.

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Keibi says it has some of the largest social networks in trials now, but wouldn’t name names.

An obvious concern is that the market simply isn’t large enough to support a niche company like Keibi. Not so, chief executive Paul Remer tells us: He claims that “a couple hundred” social networks have enough scale to make use of this tool.

Keibi isn’t just eyeing popular social networks — it is aiming for other parts of the ecosystem, like widget-makers Slide and RockYou, Remer says.

Many widget companies, which span multiple social networks with applications like slideshows of images, have more users than social networks themselves.

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Potential customers go beyond social networks. As large companies adopt social networking features to highlight their own brands, Remer adds, they too will want to to avoid the embarrassment of featuring user-generated porn.

The company is also working on video and text analysis — so soon no more amateur porn stories or videos, either.

Keibi’s service, currently web-based, is available for $5,000 to $20,000 per month; some customization may be necessary to ensure that Keibi’s software can access and delete problematic content.

The company has received more than $5 million in funding from Catamount Ventures and Hunt Ventures. It was founded in late 2006.

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