Mark Pincus Blog

the times acting like big dumb old media that they are

david chappell, the deputy managing editor, has been responding to all of your inquiries with the same email. (thanks to those who forwarded back to me).  while i'm happy they responded at all and did print a correction, it's sad to see a news organization take so little ownership and responsibility for their actions.

chappell's response is basically that this was just a matter a mere omission. see, they forgot to add the word 'blog' after 'mark pincus'. guess that would have made a world of difference to print a racist quote and attribute it to 'mark pincus blog'. sure their readers would have all just assumed that meant an idiot posted a comment to my blog which the times did me the favor of broadcasting to a larger audience. why would anyone think i said that?

my friend jason calcanis (not afraid to tell anyone what he thinks) pointed out to mr. chappell that this would be no different than a blog taking a quote from an oped piece in their paper and republishing it as simply 'the times'. in fact, we should all try that just for fun.

what would be the right response from the times? how about starting with 'wow, did we ever fuck up'? how about admitting that their process is broken? how about stating clearly that they dont believe it's ok to lift qoutes from blogs that create gross mis perceptions about the author's true intent?

no, it's not enough to just say that the journalist, mr. ayres (who btw seems like a nice guy), was not 'culpable'. hey chappell, you forgot the second half of that sentence...'and our paper WAS culpable'. some editor (probably chappell) had to review the article, decide to add the sidebar with quotes and WAS responsible for this totally wrong and maligning mis-presentation...and that guy should be fired.

folks, here's what's wrong with big media. they suck ass as much as the leaders they cover. the message is clear. the buck doesnt stop with anyone but us. the ants are always left holding the bag because it's nobody's fault.

when waste management calls my cell phone because 'you've been selected for a customer survey'. when the president admits that he has instructed the cia to illegally put US citizens under surveillance. when ceo's can make windfall profits selling stock in companies that are 'mis-stating' earnings and when major newspapers can malign someone's reputation. THEY ARE ALL JUST DOING THEIR JOBS! IT'S NOBODY'S FAULT.

this is why we need a revolution. newspapers used to be the power of the people but then they just became shitty fucking corporations that 'serve shareholders'. this is why we need a new form of capitalism. this is why craig newmark will be king and the newspapers will all die.

must be a tough new world for mr. chappell and his media counterparts. they'll have to learn new rules of engagement. like the leaders of governments and corporations they cover, they'll have to learn to answer to the people.

in honor of mr. chappell and the times i'm starting a new tag/category on my blog, "dumb media".

i encourage you all to continue letting mr. chappell know what you think of their practices.

The 6A Team Rocks!

since i posted last night that i was 'pissed at typepad' (tried to single out the app and not the people) ben trott (co-creator) has emailed me three times and anil dash commented back on my blog. that's a team that cares. every new web based service is going to have bugs. very few have management teams looking for complaints and then responding (and on a weekend too). it's an amazing contrast to my experience with sonos where not only was i unable to ever reach a person beyond front line tech support, but i have even been flamed here on my own blog for being such an idiot i couldnt figure it out. if i could, i'd go way long sixapart and short sonos. (ok the sonos one is just emotional. the product is so cool that i'm sure i'd lose betting against them but they should care more about their customers.)

also amazing to think that sonos has so many fewer customers than typepad. guess that shows the power of the medium. however, given how much trouble companies go through to get customer feedback it's mindboggling to me that the management team (and vcs) behind sonos havent at least figured out enough to search blogs for discussion of their product and respond as 6A so brilliantly does.  just shows the difference in dealing with (and i hate to use this now tired jargon but i will) a web 2.0 company that gets the power of a product as a living conversation, though i should expect no less from the company that is the creator of the concept.

Tribe Turns on Open Profiles

if you click on my tribe profile, you'll see a glimpse of our new open profile architecture in action. the team has been working hard for many months on this and unfortunately my meager attempt at customizing something doesnt really show it off. it'll be fun to watch what all you uber hackers do with this and see the team reveal more of its power over time.

here's a few more creative open profiles too...elliot, gary, and pengrin.

Vertical Search Engines and Aggregators

last week, walt mossberg wrote about two new search services that focused deeply on a particular vertical segment. i wanted to share my own thoughts on this concept and the categories he highlights.

jobs - indeed.com - he points out that indeed is aggregating most big job sites. my first question is whether the most important driver for a job applicant is comprehensiveness. we hired a terrific office manager slash 10 other roles on craigslist. she said she chose craig because he offered 'the best' jobs. by this she meant the most relevant organic (created there) jobs for her search. in her case, this meant jobs from real people (hiring managers like me) and not from recruiters, or worse, staffing firms who she says will regularly bait and switch to harvest more resumes. i'd like to hear from people what the use case is for most comprehensive in jobs. seems to me that relevance (ie. not wasting time sifting through a lot of wrong results is more important).

if this search aggregation follows the path that the overall web serach took, the winner will be the 'google' of each space, meaning the company that shows me the 3 results that meet my criteria and not the 3000. anyone remember being impressed with alta vista that it searched the 'whole' web? anyone remember using alta vista to find anything quickly? no. it was a project.

Indeed's search results were often too vague. A search for "screenwriter" in California turned up postings for office assistants, movie producers and even someone to remove a computer virus -- but none for actual screenwriters.

people - ziggs - course i've been talking about the coming peopleweb and this sounds like one of the first aggregators out there, however, i dont get the business model. why would i pay $25 to be listed in their directory when i can get found on the web way more often in google? oh wait, they also will buy my name on google for $50 a year...lets see, if i got googled 100 times a week, and clicked on 10% of the time (which is high but i'm vain:) and it costs $0.10 per click, that would be $1 per month. whoa, high margin biz! i'd pay the folks at ziggs a lot just for the list of consumers who were that dumb and lazy! maybe they could call it the 'buy a bridge in brooklyn' list. also, how will anyone ever know to use this site? will it be so massively popular that a year from now we'll all be saying, 'hey, i'm going to go zigg that hottie'? if so, i'll eat my blog (and buy their customer list too:) maybe they should have called it 'shag.com'. at least i'd remember it and have more fun saying 'have you shagged me yet?'

and what's ironic is that people is the place you really do want comprehensiveness and relevance, but mossberg says...

And it seems to be aimed more at helping people and companies promote themselves than at providing comprehensive information. Ziggs search results provide only neutral or flattering biographies, not information that might warn you away from a person.

now here's what i dont get, when i 'zigged' myself it only shows me a 'mr mark pincus of pittsburgh'. if i google myself, i own the whole page. if this site is less comprehensive than google why would anyone ever use it?

one funny (to me) aside on this whole topic is that two yrs ago when i started playing with all this stuff, i bought my name on google (course now i could just pay $50 for it:). i described this as the ultimate web vanity plates. bonus is google tells you how many times you've been 'zigged', or i mean googled. jonathan abrams (who was found by ziggs but third on the list. wonder if he paid the $25?) outbid me on my name and put up an ad saying 'get the real scoop on pincus for $25). taught me a fast lesson about this new world where anyone can 'own' your name.

where will this all lead? how far are we from anti fan blogs where girls can 'out' players, employees can 'out' ruthless bosses? we already had fucked company. anyone want to launch fucked boyfriend or fucked boss or how about fucked vc? i'll sell you my domain, 'ratemyvc.com', which is a more polite version:)

all listings - oodle. this is a sight that didnt get featured by mossberg. it was just launched by craig donato and does a good job of aggregating all local listings for 3 cities to start with. my question is how will they get repeat traffic at a cost that allows them a profit with google ad sense? and what will happen when everyone becomes an aggregator, or worse, a standard emerges allowing all listings originators to publish their listings in whatever fashion they choose? what role will aggregators have when they have a disadvantage in traffic acquisition and no advantage in aggregating? this smart guy, jason dowdell, sees this as the beginning of a wave of vertical search players.

Counting people not blogs

dave sifry from technorati has sent around an interesting chart which tracks total blogs and blog creation. he finds that there are 40,000 new blogs created a day which is twice the number from 5 months ago. while this is exciting, it's ironic that on the same day myspace put out a press release saying they are adding 60,000 new users a day. as most of you probably know, myspace is giving its users unique url's and basic blogging/diary capabilities. now i'm not disputing whether dave is wrong to exclude social network hosted 'blogs' or what constitues a blog, but i do wonder why noone is yet tracking the growth of the peopleweb. seems to me, we should be tracking the total number of people with 'open' profiles of any sort. that would include blogs that are identified as people and SN profiles that are open and publicly findable like blogs.

why should we care? (you may be now asking) well, this will give us an idea of what populations and what part of the overall population is findable and linkable in a public way. seems to me that at some point of critical mass, some of you smart hackers will start to turn on cool applications that will surface the power of the peopleweb. no more waiting for friendster, myspace, tribe to finally turn on the feature you wanted. no more trying to hack it together in a non-scalable way on your neighborhood blog. there will be apps running as web services across the peopleweb. obviously, i see classifieds working pefectly. i'm sure there will be much more fun apps too.

will this all happen through tags? we've all seen tags grow into the latest hot idea and it seems like this could be a vehicle for these new apps, however, i do not believe that normal people (the masses) will ever care about them or adopt them. maybe this is obvious, but tags make a ton of sense in the background, built into the 'sell my car' or 'get me a date' app.

The PeopleWeb

i believe we are close to the point where people will start to be organized online into a 'peopleweb' where browsers will surf and search through people not pages. i will attempt to describe the what, how and why below.

what is the peopleweb? as more people take on 'open' identities online, that can be crawled, found and linked to with bits of semantically organized data like 'profile', 'about me' or 'my tribes or groups', there will soon be an ability for search engines to organize people into relevant groupings. the key relevance here will be based on two intersections; people's group affiliations so that i can quickly find experts in flying bonanzas in baja and people's credibility which may be estimated in a number of ways from how 'linked' you are to who you're linked to to slashdot type ratings if they evolve to work in an independent fashion.

how will the peopleweb happen? along with my vision of the revolution of the ants, the big portals will all succumb to their audience's desire for openness and transportability of online identities. people will no longer choose to invest in a profile that is locked into msn or friendster (or tribe). just like email had to be free and compuserve lost out to aol, so too will profiles. we already have this with blogs. my company, tribe.net, will soon be launching open profiles which will let people compbine elements of their blogs with social and community networks. this will occur with virtually every site, where users will decide who has access to what, whether it's by degrees of separation or group affiliation. this wont be decided by my company, friendster, linkedin, yahoo's new thing etc...

what will the peopleweb enable? well, imagine a future where the network acts as one database. you will tell the web that you are single and what your dating criteria is. your dating profile will only be shown to those people (so no more daily humiliation of your sisters and friends snickering that you describe yourself as a tall dark handsome romantic). kinda unhappy with your job. no problem. tell the network you're available for jobs paying over $150k, vp level, and maybe you want to limit to a few companies or block them. wanna organize a poltical revolution without leaving your home? just tell the network you are into 'emergent democracy' and 'legal revolution' (possibly through group tags) and you will automagically be connected with all the other archair revoultionaries.

i find it exciting that google has no inherent advantages in organizing the world's people and groups. google's forte has been normalizing disparate information that didnt necessarily intend to be found. the peopleweb will be much more about people wanting to be found. if people choose to semantically organize, then the act of aggregating them and sorting relevance will be a trivial task, quickly commoditized and performed by any service.

beyond the peopleweb, the network becomes the marketplace...wanna sell your car? just tell the network make, mileage and price. no more worrying about which network and price will work out best. in a world where all information is free, database lockin and its proponents go away. in this world, the ante is aggregation and syndication, winning is about surfacing better relevance. interesting questions to me are what role does ebay, amazon (used merch) and google play. if i can readily find any new or used book from any online bookstore; if i can just as easily get bids on my car with joecars.com as ebay, where is the value? does the traffic value go away? and then what value is left? do the intermediaries and marketplaces get commoditized and wiped out? will this be similar to how ECN's wiped out the huge spreads and profits of wall street market makers? i wonder if one day ebay's value gets disaaggregated into ratings, payment processing and escrow?

what will the roadmap look like? my guesss is that in the next year we'll see the more enlightened big players realize that they are better off aggregating and syndicating than trying to stand alone defending their franchises and competing with the overall network. join it and extend. dont fight it and get left behind. AOL couldnt keep up with the overall network. i dont believe ebay will be able to either. (in fact, ebay announced today that they are launching an int'l competitor to craigslist. i think they will soon learn that the most powerful approach will be to aggregate everyone out there and syndicate back out. we'll see.)

dont ask dont tell stage...today we're at a point where officially the big players say no crawling, but unofficially they let it fly. indeed.com is quietly crawling everyone job service from career builder to craigslist. i hear that lycos has a dating service crawling all. makes sense. if i'm match.com and have the biggest db of single women, i should be in the pimping business. you can find my women everywhere but pay me if you want to meet them.

all for now. love to hear where any of you are seeing the peopleweb and one marketplace happen.