Secret London: From Facebook Group to Web Site

Making the leap from Facebook group to standalone Web site, Secret London made its debut earlier this week. And it’s raised anew the question: Can an impassioned social-networking community be transformed into an active, and lucrative, digital media business?

The story of Secret London is already passing, as I write, into the pages of Web lore: Londoner Tiffany Philippou (“of East Finchley,” the Evening Standard’s Mike Prigg noted, in a veddy British aside) started a Facebook group to share and celebrate the best “secrets” of the great metropolis, from best graveyard to mope about in (Brompton Cemetery) to the “best independent coffee shop open at 8 a.m. on Saturday mornings” to the best place to view graffiti (the abandoned Finsbury Park railway station). Two weeks later the Secret London group had more than 180,000 members and Philippou, 21, had an innovator’s dilemma on her hands: Should she go public, with a full-fledged Web site? If so, where would she get the resources to build the online community?

So she did what any self-respecting 20-something Webpreneur would do: She asked for volunteers.

“What’s amazing ... is how much you can do cheaply if you are working on a project that inspires people,” Philippou reported in a guest blog on TechCrunch Europe. Last weekend, fueled by copious amounts of caffeine and alcohol, she and 40 of her new best friends built the new Web site in 48 hours, for under £3000 (about $3400).

It’s hardly perfect – users reported that the design fails in Internet Explorer 7, and it’s still “under construction” – and it’s not clear that the fan base from Secret London Facebook will find its way to the new site. This blog post, on the E-consultancy site, explores the challenges faced in trying to make the site sustainable, much less moneymaking. For now, though, Tiffany Philippou is the darling of the Web media crowd. She has a growing following, and she has proven once again the power of crowdsourcing.

And if you want to find the best kebab shop in London, you know where to go.