Mark Pincus Blog

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.

'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!

Connecting to 'Greek Tragedy' story

just realizing there's a really easy way for people to build their blog traffic fast. just blog about anything that is most popular on technorati. today it will obviously be stephanie klein, the vivacious girl of greek tragedy fame. wonder if she is technorati'ing herself too...? hmm, stephanie, if you're reading this, i have a few great guys to set you up with in nyc. email me.

News Corp Buys Myspace for $580M

bambi reports that news corp bought intermix, the parent of myspace, for $580m today. i have to admit that i passed on buying intermix stock a while ago at $6 because i thought that the overall valuation was too high for just the myspace asset. given the reported revenue numbers for myspace of around $9m, this had to be a highly strategic acquisition. i had thought recently that someone like viacom might be myspace or the facebook to add to their mtv properties as these sites are starting to aggregate such large young audiences. this looks like a nice fast exit for redpoint which i believe funded myspace a year ago at a $50m valuation. not sure how this worked out for them but guessing they made at least 5x, which would probably be about $50m on $10m.