Mark Pincus Blog

I hate godaddy.com

if any of you have ever tried godaddy.com for domain registration you know how annoying they are. it's offensive a web site can treat people so blatantly like the stupid mice we are and when does it to the degree that godaddy goes you find yourself swearing while typing. what they do is make you click through tons of screens that offer you hosting and other crap you dont want. even after you click on 'quickcheckout' they sneak in a two year, auto renewable registration. i've been a loyally stupid mouse for 3 years, swearing and typing weekly. i'm finally going cold turkey. can anyone recommend a more consumer friendly domain registration site? oh, and how about one that remembers your credit card details? why doesnt amazon add this to their one click program. would add days on my life!

I hate godaddy.com

if any of you have ever tried godaddy.com for domain registration you know how annoying they are. it's offensive a web site can treat people so blatantly like the stupid mice we are and when does it to the degree that godaddy goes you find yourself swearing while typing. what they do is make you click through tons of screens that offer you hosting and other crap you dont want. even after you click on 'quickcheckout' they sneak in a two year, auto renewable registration. i've been a loyally stupid mouse for 3 years, swearing and typing weekly. i'm finally going cold turkey. can anyone recommend a more consumer friendly domain registration site? oh, and how about one that remembers your credit card details? why doesnt amazon add this to their one click program. would add days on my life!

Problems with typepad

like other typepad users i've been dealing with annoying server problems. i got really pissed at one point because i have been losing entire posts when the server post page isnt found. i've also found that many posts go up twice because i have to hit the stop and submit so many times to publish. the team was very responsive and i was assured this was an isolated incident. subsequently, the ceo, barak, sent out a great note letting us all know about the hosting problems the company has been experiencing. i always applaud ceo's for being forthright with their customers.

however, here's what bothers me and i know it's a really tough question. i like the company. i love their story and authenticity. but i also dont feel it's fair for me to pay my $14.95 a month even when i have to experience all these server problems. if i didnt like the company so much, i'd probably leave the service even though the hurdle is so high in moving your content and then getting 'found' again. my google page still goes to my old blogger blog. this does make me think i'd be better off hosting my own blog and not being subject to the vagaries of another company.

as much as i like the company, i think 6A has to do more right now for its loyal customers who by the way give them marketing promotion every day that we post and add more viewers and potential blog customers to the platform footprint. i dont know what is appropriate but a sincere letter isnt enough for me.

Larry David Moments - how to save the show!

ehas anyone noticed that larry david's 'curb your enthusiasm' isnt that funny this season? it's devolved into a 'sitcom' where it once was his edgy platform to 'out' all the stuff we wouldnt talk about. seems like he's run out of good ideas. well, i know a place he could go...the peer production factory! ask the ants to help.

here's my idea...why dont we create 'larrydavidmoments.com'. this site will aggregate everyone's larry david moments on one site. then we'll copywrite the stories and offer to sell them back to the show for $25k a piece with the caveat that money and credit go to the creator of that show. maybe the person can even be on it. how much more interesting and fun would that be?

here's how it works. we all blog our stories and tag them 'larrydavidmoments'. once there's enough we put up a site (just bought the larrydavidmoments.tv. can you believe .com was take!). we get HBO or larry david or larry charles to subscribe to our rss feed and eventually one hits. given how weak these episodes are seems it's his (our) only chance for another season.

Antrepreneurs

this guy russ beattie from yahoo put up the best bubble 2.0 post i've seen. hopefully, this will end all of the reactionary, 'oh my god, this is another sign of it' posts. he's the only one i've found that backs it up with great examples. his argument is that there's a lot of little companies running around pitching new services that dont change the world or even people's lives. he also has a funny point about how we lack bigger than life personalities like jobs and ellison. i think we have them in spades (anyone ever sat next to marc canter?). just that none of them have the right pulpit, yet. i would love to see larry and sergey step up as more vocal and visible leaders on the new valley but they've got plenty of time for that.

i'd like to find a constructive note in all this. maybe it's that we are in a terrific time of experimentation and we should just let it roll and flourish. we have noted how little it costs. also, we are in a time of what the USV guys are calling 'peer production'. this started with open source software but has moved to the production of content and services too. in that world small bits add up to big ideas like craigslist. its the revolution of the ants. maybe that means we're entering a new time of ant services from ant companies and antrepreneurs!

Participatory Commerce 1.0

i'm posting a response i sent to esther dyson where i suggest a different approach to conferences. my hope is that there can be more smaller conferences with a focus on bringing industry participants together and encouraging new collaborative approaches.

But the new discussion I'd like to foster is how participants in emerging industries can create new collaborative models. I tried this in the beginning of social networking, creating FOAF but couldn’t get friendster (jonathan) to see past their noses! They were worried about comp from below (us and others) instead of the real comp from above (yhoo).

I'm hoping that with the new online ad industry and emerging open p2p marketplace, big and small players can work together. Here's why. Big players need to *absorb* the innovation of small players in order to remain competitive. Instead they resist them until its too late and then buy them if they can. Small players need to focus their innovation on new problems and not spend cycles just trying to get an audience or recreate the base services already out there.

I would love to see industry leaders and conf organizers band together to help enable this dialog and have a lot of ideas to help.

as an entrepreneur, i'm always wishing i had access to the big platforms that major players have created. it would be so much more interesting and fun to start with all of ebay as my market. big companies have the opposite problem. how can they experiment with a lot of new models and services without great risk to their large, existing business? google has done an impressive job, better than any company i've ever seen. yet even google with half the engineers in the valley cant experiment as fast as an ecosystem with 1000's of scrappy entrepreneurs and engineers.

Why do oil companies make more when prices go up?

Reading about the record $19 billion in quarterly profits by exxon and shell. The wsj and congress are starting to bring up the question of what a 'fair' profit is. Something seems a bit wrong for companies to profit from disasters, wars and the general social misery of higher oil prices.

Putting that aside I still don't get why a company in the business of oil refining or distribution makes more profits when prices go up. Obviously reserves will increase directly and that could explain some.

I'm an investor in valero which I started liking about 2 yrs ago as a great way to bet on oil price increases as they refine sour crude at a cost of $12 and sell at market, an insulated way to bet on price increase.

It these profits are merely from the increased spread on their own costs of drilling and refining reserves I get that. If, however, companies are taking the opportunity created by short term shortages to increase their margins on distribution, that seems like profiteering. I'm not sure why the two seem different.

And conversely I wonder how it would be fair for congress to force companies to sell their reserves at below market prices simply because they're based in the US. Do certain industries have a social responsibility beyond others?
Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

Craig Donato's Response...

my friend craig was nice enough to respond in the comments section of my previous post on google base and i thought i'd repost his points to make sure they're seen (why is it that rss doesnt include comments?).  and btw, i hope everyone is starting to check out memeorandum which does a great job of aggregating conversation threads through links.

Hi Mark,

I wasn't trying to make a value judgement on what Google is doing. I only wanted to note that they've crossed a line.

Up until this point, Google has take the role of the "pure" search engine (v. portal) and maintained a neutral stance with respect to the content in their index. I admired that they wanted to get users off their site as quickly as possible.

Now they will be in the business of generating content and competing with the publishers in their index. Not an evil thing to do, just very "portal-like".

To directly respond to a few of your open questions...

"arent you running a service that scrapes other classifieds sites but doesnt allow your own to be scraped?"

Nope. We are heavily crawled by google, yahoo, msn, etc.

"arent you competing with the sites that you are 'indexing'?"

Nope. We're not in the business of selling classified listings. Our aim is to focus on the needs of buyers who want to quickly see all the listings that are out there.

"isnt the hope for oodle that people will go to you first and then click on ads you sell while looking at classifieds from other sites."

Yes, we want to be the first stop for buyers. I think the classified experience for buyers stinks (which is why I started Oodle). If we can better serve buyers by making it easy for them to find what they're looking for, we in turn help sellers and those in the business of selling them advertising.

ok. craig sheds some light here but not sure why you're still not directly answering my question about being crawled. no room for politicians on this blog! are you saying that *anyone* can crawl you, or that anyone you consider non-competitive can? you mention google, yahoo, msn. could i start a competing classifieds aggregator and crawl your site?

if you are saying that you dont want to allow a competing service crawl you and reuse what you consider to be your intellectual property, then i respect that decsions, however...then you must also respect craig newmark's decision that your service is ultimately competitive so he wont allow crawling.

this is a very hard question. if oodle's business is to crawl and normalize data and then resell it to newspapers, how could oodle let me crawl them and offer it free? however, it doesnt seem fair to crawl other people but then restrict it yourself. catch 22. i still say that anyone who crawls my data should allow themselves to be crawled too or lose that right.

does anyone know if google allows themselves to be crawled? if not, that would be the king of all injustices. and if not, i really dont see why craig newmark would want to allow google either if they are truly launching google base.

Shorted Ebay today

putting my money where my blog mouth is, i shorted 5000 shares of ebay at $39 today. as i've said, i think ebay is a great company run by really smart people, however, i believe they have some tough times ahead as their walled garden marketplace confronts competition from the free and open network. as many have also said, their purchase of skype which is hard to justify on any synergistic level seems like a big sell sign. looks like backwards arbitrage as they are useing their stock at say a 40 p/e and buying another stock at say a 300 p/e.

open source data?

great convo amongst fred wilson and john battelle (and i'm chiming in) around the interesting question of how the p2p classifieds market is going to change (which we can be sure will happen).

john makes great points about why craig should not be a walled garden (which thankfully now has a business case study called AOL for its failure. remember when that was considered a viable strategy?).

fred wilson chimes in too recognizing this is about community and not comprehensiveness...

I think if Google is simply aggregating user listings, like it aggregates text CPC ads, then Craigslist has less to fear from Google Base.  If Google Base is going to build a community, like Tribe or MySpace, then everyone has a lot to fear.

here's my take, there should be a standard for an open source world of data sharing. it should require that anyone who crawls me allows themselves to be crawled too. why should google be able to use my hard earned data if they dont let me and others use theirs?  now that sounds like microsoft! i'd like to know if i'm right that the other craig (donato) wont let services crawl and use his data. and if that's so, john battelle, please explain why you think craig newmark should welcome his crawlers which are intent on competing. i believe that oodle did start out as a consumer focused service but switched to serving other sites when it realized it would be too costly to build brand and traffic as has likely been the case for indeed and simply hired too.

the ultimate answer appears fairly simple. services that worry only about enabling the best possible solution for their users will beat out services that wall their users off, especially when its not in their users interests. clearly, ebay is not helping its users by stopping their listings from being crawled, right?

also, not sure i agree with john's comments about improving craigslist the service. seems that his reluctance to ever change his UI has made users of all levels love him. i found at tribe that every time we made a change, our community went beserk. people like their newspaper to look the same every day. they build a behaviour and thats good.