Ask Jason (on vicodin)
Had some serious oral surgery yesterday and I’m really feeling loopy on the vicodin… you guys know that that means: ASK JASON TIME! So, post your comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them in my foggy state.
Note: I’m doing this over at Pownce too.
John Battelle does the right thing: DEMOing at Web 2.0 is now free!
Wanted to give a big RIGHT ON! to John Battelle for taking the payola out of demoing at tech conference: this year at the Web 2.0 conference startup companies will no longer have to pay to get on stage.
Mike and I started the TechCrunch40 conference in large part to fight the trend of DEMO-style conferences for sticking it to startup companies by making them pay $18.5k for six minutes on stage–SIX MINUTES!!! Over three thousand dollars a minute. I still can’t get my head around that number.
Are these companies being forced to pay? No. However, I believe that the trend was moving to pay for play and I’m really excited that the trend is now swinging back to the entrepreneur. In fact nothing would please me more then being part of the trend that shutdown the concept of startups paying to present on stage. I actually think that’s what going to happen…. really I do. Why would anyone pay $18,500 to present for six minutes if conferences like TechCrunch40 and the Web 2.0 Summit don’t charge? Who in their right mind would pay this fee?
This is nothing personal against the folks who run the other trade shows. I know the folks who run the trade shows and I think they are very smart, nice people. However, as an entrepreneur i can’t tell you how much it grinds me to have folks ask for THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS a minute for people to present their companies.
- To my fellow entrepreneurs I say this: form a united front and don’t support the trend of pay for play.
- To the folks running those other conference I say this: Do the right thing and waive the demo fee.
Paying for a ticket to an event? Sure, I get it… the event cost money to put on. I don’t even have a problem with speakers being asked to pay for an event. Every warm body at an event costs hundreds of dollars a day. The conference producers shouldn’t have to lose money putting on the show.
Paying to sponsor an event if you’re a law firm, a big tech company, or a VC? Sure, supporting events is great and we should reward and encourage these folks to continue to underwrite events. We should be really thankful that there are cool companies like AOL, Google, Microsoft, HP, and Yahoo who will support events like this.
However, 70 start up companies paying almost $20k each? No–that’s just not cool. If you pay that fee you’re encouraging other conference producers to charge you the next time. I suggest holding out to present at another conference, or heck… start your own conference!
My prediction: This is the last year ANYONE will be able to charge entrepreneurs to present on stage… .and the makes me very happy. 
Mahalo OPML demos…
As everyone knows Mahalo isn’t just a search engine/service, it’s also a platform. A platform we’re hoping that developers can leverage to make money… in other words, a “win-win-win.” 
As in users get new interesting products developed on our platform by independent developer. We are working with dozens of developers right now, and they are really brainstorming about how we can all make cool products–and a living–together.
Ray has a great demo of Mahalo’s OPML structure on his blog today.
Robert Scoble on Mahalo, TechMeme, Facebook, and SEO
[ Note: I have a deeper post on this subject coming. Just getting back from camping in the Catskill Mountains . ]
Robert Scoble did a very interesting series of videos on why humans matter with regard to search. His videos has started an amazing discussion, and perhaps the most interesting part for me is watching the SEOs attack Robert. My pal Danny Sullivan got so upset he dropped the F-BOMB! Whoa…. and Danny is just an SEO sympthasizer. Clearl something is happening here (and you don’t know what it is… do you… Mr. Scoble).
Robert’s first post: Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years
Robert’s second post filled with links to all the folks who are attacking him:
http://scobleizer.com/2007/08/27/scoble-cant-be-more-wrong/
Very interesting debate…. I’m going to jump in after I read everything.
Feedback on Professor Scoble's assesment of Mahalo, Facebook, and Techmeme.
As I dusted off the last of the Catskill mountains camping trip I was greeted with a three-part video series from “the Professor” claiming that Facebook, TechMeme, and Mahalo were going to replace Google in four years. Everyone has jumped on board this one–some agree, many disagree.
Flattering? Of course, but truth be told replacing Google is not really our goal here at Mahalo. Google is great at what they do, and we’re 90 days into our public beta and I think we’re doing a “very good” job at what we do. What we do, for the record, is the top 1/3rd of search terms. The ones that people do over and over again, and that putting a human brain on to COMPLIMENT a machine and social process, will help. So, something like iPhone or unlocked iPhone we will do… “iPhone meetups in Boise” we will leave for Google.
We think we can participate in the search landscape over the next five to ten years, but we don’t have to replace–or displace–anyone to do that “at scale.” There’s plenty of search–and find–traffic to go around. Google didn’t “replace” Yahoo, and Mahalo certainly won’t replace Google.
In fact, we need Google for when we don’t have a result. If a search term is done so infrequently that you can’t recoup the investment in human capital to do it, well, then you should use a machine (which is very low cost).
Now that I’ve given a HUGE disclaimer that we’re not trying to be a “Google killer” (as if), it is very important to realize that there is ALWAYS a better solution to the current one out there. That just stands to reason and it is part of the human spirit to believe that ANYTHING can be done at least a LITTLE bit better right?
Typically these new solutions seem crazy when they are introduced by small groups of people with very big plans. Google started with zero marketshare, and so did Yahoo for that matter. Additionally, the market is expanding in a major way. There might be 10M visitors out there for your services that are not even currently online! Or, there might be 10M users ready to double their time online, so you’re not actually taking anything away from the incumbents by “getting” them.
OK, so, putting all the “killer” stuff aside since it’s the very moot “if” and what I’m focus on is the very real “how.”
Robert clearly understands that the best filter in the world for information is people you trust. That is what Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are all about. Information related to the question “should I buy an iPhone” can be found in many different places and forms online, but the best place to look is with someone you trust. For me, that means I talk (or I should say listen) to Peter Rojas, Ryan Block, CK Sample, and Walt Mossberg. That’s my network for that information.
Of course, there are many times when I might now know someone who has the information I want. Like, what hotels should I consider in Paris or what is the best way to learn to speak French? That’s what Mahalo is setting up to do. Of course we are not going to scale to the end of the long tail–but we don’t have to! That’s the beauty of the business model: if we can help people with the top 25,000 search terms that’s a HUGE business.
If you want to consider us a “plug in” for machine search that’s fine by me. Consider us the fat tail search index/service/engine, and consider Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSN the long tail search engine
The important truth is that head-to-head a Mahalo search result will beat a machine search results HANDS DOWN every time. This makes sense since our humans start with machines and social search engines when they craft our results. If we take out 10% of the spam and introduce you to 10% better sites in a format that is 10% better organized (and we’re easily doing that TODAY) then we’ve done something AMAZING for people. We’ve made search 30% better! When’s the last time search got 30% better? Maybe not since Google came along.
Now, you’re going to have haters and I’ve got my share of them. I’ve pissed off the SEOs and the people who make their living off the SEO business existing but frankly there is nothing I can do about that. SEOs are like travel agents, telegrams, or other antiquated services. They are in their final inning and they are going to leave the building kicking and screaming. A lot of that screaming will be directed and the people who are showing them the way out. If I’m the bouncer throwing them out of the club and I have to take a couple of shots from them while kicking them into the dark, dirty alley they created…. well… I consider it an honor.
Let’s be real, SEOs have done nothing good in this world. They’ve only polluted the Internet with second rate sites designed to take advantage of people looking for the good ones.
Sorry for the "spam"
{ wall of spam by freezelight }
We installed a groovy new “email your GMAIL/HOTMAIL/YAHOO Mail” address book application over at Mahalo today to help folks share/promote our new Mahalo Follow toolbar. So, I sent a note out to my address book like I’ve done a bunch of times before for StumbleUpon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. However, got a half-dozen replies back (and the requisite Valleywag “Calacanis is a spammer” blog post) and wondered how did that happen? After trading email with my pal Nick Denton it seems that:
a) a large percentage of my friends have multiple emails and those emails are, in fact, in my address book
and
b) two of my co-workers who I share the same networks with sent out “try Mahalo Follow” emails the same way today.
So, if you got 2-10 emails from us today I’m really sorry…. we’re not in the spam business, we’re in the AVOID index spam business!
Anyway, good lesson… you can never be to conservative when it comes to sending folks emails promoting yourself.
Jarvis on his Ombudsman gig at Mahalo…
{ cc by my pal JD }
Jeff Jarvis comments on his gig working as Mahalo’s ombudsman… oh wait, he says we don’t need one! I post a long response on his blog. Echovar meditates on the issue as well.
I love when folks get it…. (or Mahalo is not for the .001%)
{ Photo from the TechCrunch party in August by SVB }
Mahalo is not for the “TechCrunch 50,000″ (i.e. the top 50,000 internet users who are obsessed with Michael Arrington’s brilliant blog which covers every tiny feature and company in the web 2.0 space).
Not that there is anything wrong in building a service for the nerds you see above… these nerds needed service too. However, they need services with bells and whistles. They need things that take time to figure out and leverage. They like complex PC-based videos games that take five hours to learn, Mahalo’s audience like Wii games that you figure out in 10 seconds. I like complex PC-based videos games too… but that’s a small audience compared to the Wii. I’m not building for myself, I’m building for scale.
It’s two different worlds.
I mean, Mahalo could be for those folks. However, the truth is if you’re part of the .001% of the web you probably know that if you want travel information the best nine sites are TKTKTKTK, TKTKTK, etc. You probably know that to find information about bittorrent clients you should go to DownloadSquad and LifeHacker. You know the lay of the land because you’re on the Internet 12 hours a day from your desktop and 6 hours a day from your mobile device.
There are, however, the majority of internet users who are spending a couple of hours a day or week on the web and who don’t know all the cool sites. They don’t know how to find what their looking for quickly. They are frustrated by all the noise. These folks are you sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, and parents in many cases. They are your non-dotcom friends who you have drinks with.
Those folks get a LOT from human-created search… as I read today:
- Mahalo is brilliant, or so says my sister. That’s what she thought when she took a look at it after looking at Twitters about it. When I asked why she thought that, here’s what she said.
Wow – now I do not have to spend hours searching for things on the Web – I can just ask MAHALO – one human powered search engine that will find the best pages for you. This is a genius concept that will move Web research in to a new dimension.
If you want to test this send your non .001% friends to three or four Mahalo pages when they are looking for information and ask them what they think of it vs. Google or Yahoo. You’ll get the idea.
I know this because at Mahalo we do actual USER TESTING labs with REAL PEOPLE all the time. When we bring in real people they LOVE what we are doing and go WILD when they get a search results done by a human. They ask things like “why isn’t Google doing this?” or “Is this service live because I need to tell my husband about it!”
The fact is, if folks who are in the .001% of the internet population are in love with our service that’s probably a BAD SIGN. The majority of folks do not want tag clouds, clustered search, bookmarking features, or the wisdom of the crowds–the research we’ve done is 100% conclusive on this. It’s not open for debate… what the vast majority of people want from search is to type a word into a box and get an organized list of high quality links. That’s it. It’s that simple, and that’s what we’re doing. What the .001% think is irrelevant with regard to building a service at scale for the masses.
Mahalo's open platform inspires developers… now how can we make them money?
Contrary to what some folks might assume, we are very open with our platform. We haven’t published our API yet (i mean, we’re in month three!), but when folks ping us and ask us to play we get super involved with them and help them any way we can.
1. Today I got a ping about this super cool 1.0 iGoogle widget.
2. Sean did this widget for bloggers recently… very cool. Again, building off our recent changes, new pages, top pages RSS feeds.
3. Brandon built a 1.0 Facebook Mahalo application which puts Mahalo on your pages… good start, interested to see where they take this. 
4. Coding Robots did a Mac dashboard widget… very sexy and clean. 
I think most of what we’ve done so far was powered by RSS (a wonderful technology), and I think our next wave of inspired applications will be driven by our OPML plans (another wonderful technology).
Not suer exactly how to enable developers to make money from doing this stuff other than:
- a) Maybe hiring them to work with us on future projects (paying people, crazy I know)
- b) Thanking them across 10 different blogs and social networks to tens of thousands of people.
- c) Giving them the ability to use our content/platform commercially… if they do have thoughts on this they can always talk to me any time.
I’m open to any and all discussions… as I’ve always been.
I was thinking of maybe running a developer contest with some very cool prizes (i.e. like an iMac, iPhone, TechCrunch 20 ticket, etc). Not cheap stuff, but real cool items. Not sure if developers feel like those contests are exploitive or fun (I am, obviously, not a developer so I don’t want to presume one or the other).
[ Note: If I missed any applications here let me know... jason at mahalo dot com ]
Silicon Alley Reporter covers…
Just stumble on these… thanks for taking the time to place them Andrew. Sad to see Theresa on the cover of issue 18… RIP TD.
Silicon Alley Reporter Covers
