Some folks don’t know how Mahalo’s social network works and why we’re doing it. I thought I would show a couple of examples with some screen shots.

OVERVIEW
Mahalo Social is our “light” social network that allows members to share links. It is most similar to the functionality of a social bookmarking site like delicious or StumbleUpon.

PROFILE PAGES (above)
Everyone on Mahalo social has a profile page. These profiles pages show your bookmarks and what search terms you’ve suggested those bookmarks to. This is how Mahalo social is different than Delicious or StubleUpon. On those services you suggest tags, on ours you suggests not only tags but the “search term” you want that links submitted to. So, if you submitted a review of the film Blade Runner you might want to tag it “sci fi, movies,blade runner” and suggest it to the search term “Blade runner.” You can only suggest a link to one search term, but you can suggest it to multiple tags.

TRUST SCORE (right)
We look at every link coming into Mahalo and if we love it we add it to the Mahalo search page you suggested it for. If we think it’s spam we ban the link. If the link is not perfect for the search we “decline” it–a softer ban. All of these behaviors are done in public so that trust is transparent.

Building Trust
As you submit links to Mahalo and we accept them we trust you more. This means we will give you the benefit of the doubt with your future links, and we might even give you more abilities on th site in the future.

Why are links declined or banned?
We will decline links for a number of reasons including the links not being related to the top of the page, them being of lower quality, or perhaps the link is already on the page.

Here is an example of couple of declined links. As you can see we passed on the FT story because it requires registration. In the second example the article wasn’t so deep and was very ad heavy. In the third issue we decline because the story is on Yahoo News where pages expire over time. In the fourth and final one we decline because the link is already on the page.

Banned Links
We ban links that are spam, dangerous, or that don’t feel like they can be trusted. Here are some examples from member profile pages. As you can see we always give a reason when we ban a link, and there is a link to the community manager at Mahalo’s page so you know who banned the link and why.

In this example this commerce site has no third party security verification.

In this link the site–selling dogs–has no contact info. We’re NOT going to include something like this obviously.

Again, here is a site we can’t get any verification on the ownership of. We could link to this page, but frankly since it’s in the spammy category of “debt” advice we’re probably better off sending users to quality sites out there that are produced by people with phone numbers and contact info on their website!

That’s how it works for now. Over time we’re going to evolve things, but so far it’s going very well. We have over 500 inks coming in a day and only 2-3% are spam and 15% are excellent and added to pages (the rest just live in the recommend links).

Questions?