Fashion's best-kept Internet secret, Bloglovin, is going from RSS to social

Fashion’s number-one RSS reader is sneaking into social territory.

Founded in 2007, Bloglovin boasts a community of 16 million users. It was built on the back of an attractive RSS reader with some discovery features. Now under new leadership with a new $7 million round of funding, CEO Joy Marcus tells VentureBeat that Bloglovin’s “base functionality” — its RSS service — will soon serve as the backbone for topic-based groups and photo-sharing.

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While Marcus kept specific product details in the dark, she shared by phone that Bloglovin will soon focus on “a lot on new products” that enable “self-expression.”

Bloglovin plans to help its users “find other users with [similar] tastes and create micro-commiunities around [areas that] users are most passionate about.” Marcus details that Bloglovin plans to cater to users that are “thinking about, writing about, and posting pictures about” topics like fashion.

Marcus made clear, however, that Bloglovin will “continue to be the prettiest reader around. We will absolutely have that base functionality, and we’ll provide our users more than that,” says Marcus.

“We’re evolving. This started out as an RSS reader … a beautiful way to look at blogs. We’re on the path to becoming a user network that allows people to discover content they didn’t know about before. To create their own identity.”

Bloglovin’s audience is overwhelmingly female and young. In addition, “70 percent of our users read at least one fashion blog. Almost all of them read content in a category we call ‘women’s lifestyle,'” says Marcus.

It’s Marcus’ belief that this specific demographic will embrace “easy tools for self expression” that aren’t already offered by services like WordPress and Tumblr. “The next iteration is around user curation,” Marcus clarifies. “There will be further iterations as we grow as a network.”