Mark Pincus Blog

bambi francisco says myspace is 8.2% of google's traffic

bambi has an insightful post asking when myspace/fox will launch their own search engine. she sites an analyst who claims that myspace is now the top traffic source for google at 8.2%. this doesnt make any sense to me. i would think that sites like aol and ask would be far bigger sources.

apple video chat is fun

i've been playing with the vchat feature on apple's buddy list since buying a new powerbook with a built in isite. it's a whole new way to interact with friends. my friend vermut and i leave the window open and yell at each other while doing other things like cooking. it's a whole new way to hang out with friends without leaving the house.

danah boyd on what drives social networking

danah has a terrific essay with her take on what caused friendster's downfall and myspace's massive success. according to danah, fster didnt win because the site didnt allow playing where myspace did.

my take is that friendster was more like the facebook (i'm an investor in both) in that it was a *real* network, where myspace was more like tribe, in being an online only community.  friendster failed to scale its network so it got really slow. also, they failed to add more interesting applications so there was nothing to do with your people. the facebook remains a useful closed trusted resource for a college community manage their social lives.

today, people are just starting to see the value of maintaining an online identity. myspace's comments area serves as a public message board like the old chalk boards on our dorm rooms. in fact, myspace profiles are a lot like dorm rooms, covered in crazy decorations.

the big question is when, why and how adults will want online identities and what they'll want to do with them. seems like that remains an open space. blogs serve this purpose in a crude way, but probably way too much work. will a social network host emerge as the myspace for the rest of us? what will be the killer apps, if they're less dating focused?

yahoo's horowitz on social media/community value

bradley horowitz, one of yahoo's top strategic thinkers, has posted an insightful piece on how he and yahoo view the economics of value creation in social media. people have long accepted the idea that 1-2% of community participants do 80-90% of the posting. on sites like craigslist, one might consider these people 'market makers' as they keep a certain amount of 'liquidity' by posting fresh stuff and responding to others. this works so that most of us can stop by once a year and still find a vibrant market.

sounds like he views communities in general working in a similar fashion. one might argue that these 'lurkers' are even worth more as they are in a less sticky more surfing mode. many of have found this content while surfing through google and are more likely to leave which ironically makes them more monetizable through related ads. one problem many community sites like ivillage faced in web 1.0 before the new world of open surfing was being too sticky.

essembly.com - a political social network

i've been playing with essembly for the past day. it's the coolest political web site i've seen (because it's about interacting over informing) but it stops short of enabling the kind of grass roots organizing i've been hoping and searching for.  [if you want to try it, email me and i'll invite you on.]

it seems like the founders are trying to keep it stealth for now as they have not responded to several emails from me (or they just dont want to talk to me.)

what's cool about it is the simple way it lets users create their own 'resolves' - kind of your own little survey or policy proposal that goes out to everyone to vote on. it's fun to watch the action in votes and comments.

also cool but not used yet are the groups functions which enable candidates, coalitions and issue campaigns to organize, set their platforms and recruit.

where it falls short for me...first, it appears to be for profit which is fine, but may drive the wrong incentives. which leads to my second issue, we lack any leadership on any front. everyone is so neutral that nothing changes. we need a web movement to reform the system (i've blogged about my hopes to create an eparty). a neutral site will devolve into a message board where people are forever fragmented.

what we need is a site that can help facilitate organization and collective voice. it should gently point out our similarities on many issues rather than essembly's simplistic (but fun) approach of showing your % correlation with another person on issues. while that's cute, i'm looking for a site that can promote my overlaps with seemingly disparate people and groups so we can form NEW coalitions that can replace the current power base.

overall, i'm psyched that these kids created essembly and see it as a big step in the right direction of 'radical democracy' and hope that they/we can take it further towards enabling real action and not just real interaction.

Ebay's hidden permission marketing...

has anyone noticed how aggressive ebay and other major consumer players are getting in their marketing practices? i recently re-registered for an ebay account and was astounded at the level of privacy invasion they can take within their truste approved policy.

did you know that ebay has the right to call you...?

Call me about eBay programs such as Free Listing Days, Penny Gallery Days, Trade Shows, and special events. If you are a seller, unchecking this box means you will not receive information designed to help you expand your business on eBay.

and mail you...?

Send me email about my favorite categories, coupons, and other special offers such as Free Listing Days.

i'm a bit surprised ebay would do this. seems like the corporate mba's have won out at the long term expense of the brand.

fortune covers craigslist - communism beating capitalism!

my friend adam lashinsky at fortune has another insightful piece, this time on craig and craigslist. he's gleaned a few great new facts like that they should do $20m in revs this year on $5m in expenses, and really captures the gastalt of craig. thankfully, he cuts the story of craig to a paragraph but we'll all have to get used to its retelling as he gets increased business press.

also, interestingly, adam gets the founder of stubhub to estimate what craig could be making if he chose to really monetize his traffic - $500 million! of course, if he went for the gold, his users might head for the door.

one does get the feeling reading adam's story that craig is this pillsbury doughboy giant from ghost busters knocking over buildings (newspaper chains) without even seeing them.

adam talks about the potential of googlebase to attack craig's base. i dont buy it. i think that classifieds are about quality leads fast and not the most leads, and that craig's loose sense of community will trump google's lack of community or humanity. also, he talks about keeping up with technology and new features. helloo!! i tried that one. craig wins because he doesnt change it, so changing faster isnt going to help.

'help the community' vs. 'help myself' - how to motivate peer production?

fred wilson writes about amazon's new HITs service which allows companies to pay people to provide useful data and content...it brings up the interesting question of which incentive a community driven service is appealing to 'help the communty' or 'help myself'.

According to Amazon, a HIT is a Human Intelligent Task, ie something that humans do better than computers.  Like identifying photos or filling out captchas.

Amazon has built a service called Mechanical Turk, or mturk.com, that is like eBay for HITs.

If you need a human to do something, you send a HIT request (via the mturk API) to Amazon.

The HIT is displayed to the masses, who then complete them, and get paid for doing so.

This is an attempt to automate peer production and add a payment system on top of it.

i'm very skeptical even though it's so cool to see. as fred points out, community contributed content relies on personal incentives to drive good results. in some cases, this is entirely self interest, and that usually works best - ebay and craigslist. in a few cases there seems to be a more 'help the community' ethos which can work like delicious.

at tribe, we launched a 'pay it forward' program a year ago. the idea, which i was really excited about, was that a lister could name a bounty to be paid to anyone who helped them get a transaction done. we experimented with jobs which already have examples of bounties. at the time, i hoped there could one day be a marketplace with attention driven by individuals forwarding listings to friends they knew were in the market for an apartment, job or car.

our experiment failed. we found that the number of forwards went up by 4x but the number of job applications did not. many tribe users told me they would forward a job to a friend whenever they saw one that might fit to help them out and that a bounty would not make them think of new friends or more likely to send to an existing one. in other words, they said this is something they do out of
'help the community' and not 'help myself'.

my belief is that there is little to no crossover. i have also learned how hard it is to change consumer behavior. if you're trying to build a peer produced system seems that you have to leverage existing behaviors driven by one of these two incentives and never bet on them changing. amazon's new services will only work if they can tap into people's 'help myself' incentive and i seriously doubt the dollar incentive will ever work. jobs was the highest bounty incentive we could find at as much as $5k and it failed.

i know there are also a number of startups pursuing this type of system specifically in jobs. i doubt this approach will work but will watch with great interest. maybe it's a good idea that was poorly implemented by me, which would not be the first or last time that happened!

Who's reading my blog...

ok, so i got a few people who told me i should just go set up feeds on feedburner which i will do. it was nice to hear from a bunch of people that i know and dont that they follow my blog. maybe typepad or someone else should offer a guestbook, which would be a lighter way to say 'hi' than leaving comments. it would also be nice if there was a feature in blog readers that would let people immediately comment back without having to go back to the blog and comment.

i've had about 37 people email me back with the majority saying they get my RSS. it's cool to get all the emails from everyone. you start to wonder if anyone is actually listening and then it's a bit weird  and really cool to find out some are!

the numbers. sounds like i have 92 subscribers through bloglines and 18 through newsgator plus about 100 page views a day. what's interesting is that i ran into so many people at web 2.0 who had read my blog. i guess i will have a lot more influence on the idea economy than the actual one:)

Community vs. the Corporation

jeremy zawodny had a great post covering a piece by robert young on the dilemma and internal battle faced inside companies like yahoo in deciding how far to go in handing control over to their communities...

I've got one foot inside the company and the other firmly planted in the community. The two are often at odds and, more often than not, I side with the community.

This makes some people at Yahoo very unhappy, but I really believe that it's in the best interest of Yahoo. I'm not doing it just to be a pain in the ass. Some people are really good at running a business. I like to think that I do a decent job of representing community interests when I try to do so. And making sure the community is heard loud and clear inside the company walls helps keep us honest. That's why I say many of the things you read here.

The two camps need to better understand each other.... somehow.

The transition from the old way to the new is not easy, but we're making real progress. Some groups are getting their heads around it faster than others. Having the Flickr folks in the Yahoo family helps. Flickr is all about community. The same goes for Chad, Danah, Alex, and many of the others who've joined Yahoo this year, either through acquisition or relentless pursuit of them. The more community-minded folks we hire, acquire, and breed, the better off we are in this brave new world. There will be more before this year is over.

and robert young writes...

It won’t be the corporation that locks its customers into a walled garden any more; instead, it will be the people themselves who create their own high switching costs. For instance, if you are an eBay seller, your switching cost is not so much the relationship you’ve created with eBay itself and the store you set up, it’s the reputation and trust you spent years building with fellow members of the community. Similarly, if you are a member of MySpace, it’s not the web-page and blog you spent time constructing, it’s your social network of cyber-friends you’ve cultivated and accumulated over time.

At the end, the lesson is one of a paradox. As the power shifts increasingly towards community, the corporation loses its grip on the traditional means of control. Yet, by letting go of control, the corporation creates an environment where the community willingly creates its own switching costs. Such changing market behavior, which is structural and permanent for any industry being usurped by the Internet, must be met with a corresponding shift in corporate mindset. Otherwise, a “generation gap” will exist between the members of management themselves (old vs. new media), as well as the company and its market. In my view, if there is one company that seems to grok such dynamics better than anyone, and is in the process of executing superbly against these new set of challenges, it’s Yahoo!

my response...

i totally agree with this concept. this has been an issue at tribe since its founding. i would love to start a community site where the community has a much bigger role in deciding its fate. i do believe this is part of the brilliance of craigslist. craig is fanatical about listenting to the community both so he doesnt fuck up and so they trust they are partially in control. what's hard is that often a small part of the community is most vocal while the silent majority is too busy to bother. tribe made some big mistakes over the past couple of years by focusing at times more on business model than user love. the lesson from web 1.0 was that user love alone didnt make successful companies. in the first chapter of web 2.0 companies like myspace seem to be proving the opposite as that company has had little success in getting high ad rates or monetization per member, but such massive success on uniques and page views it doesnt seem to matter.