TC50: Stribe builds a social network for publishers around their content

Stribe builds social networks for publishers who wants to keep users glued to their site. The company launched at the TechCrunch50 conference today in San Francisco.

The French startup is trying to tackle the difficult problem of building social communities around content on a page, and outside of a social network. It’s a line of code that you add to your site, which creates an overlay that users can log into. They can see the most active users visiting the page and the most popular links people are sharing.

It feeds back metrics showing how many comments and subscribers a publisher is attracting through Stribe. It’s available in English, Spanish and French. The founders say it’s ideally suited for e-commerce and casual gaming.

Judges at the conference provided the following feedback:

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook: Wasn’t clear whether they were trying to build their own community or integrate with existing social networks.

Dick Costolo, Twitter: Sometimes products can do too much. Then it becomes difficult for people to understand what they can use your product for. One of the challenges of creating community around a Web page is figuring out the simplest thing that you can now enable people to do.

Robert Scoble: Enterprises already have tools that let you chat with customers. What makes this so much different? I want Facebook on my page. It would be a lot easier to suck in Facebook through Connect.