I have always felt that Mahalo could make it, but the time that would have to be put into a site like that to make it work is hard to grasp. I’m curious how long Jason thinks it will take before its a force.

Besides, they already got acquired- they won the rat race. They’re done.

Myspace is done, Facebook already won.

Yahoo! [and MSN] are dead in search, Google won that.

Social networking is still emerging, I’m slow to attack the industry yet.

Um, the first result was “Maryland Terrapins Football.” Giggle-worthy, yes, and I did indeed chortle and point at the screen…but not what I wanted from a search. And the fact that it brings up Google results…well, who cares? I could (and will) use Google.

By the way I would just like to claim a few things myself… I invented drinking water and breathing air, so in all your faces.

Yahoo – Agree…it’s gonna sink. Trim it down. Give a fresh coat of paint and throw it out on Craig’s List.

Twitter – Disagree…it’s a fad appealing to earlier adopters which in turn peaks the interest of everyone else. Once everyone else arrives, they’ll wonder, “What’s the big deal?” Twitter has a Second Life quality about it — meaningful to a small group of people it’s AMAZING, but the masses just don’t care.

MySpace – Agree 100%. Too much bad press has labeled it as a place for perverts and child molesters.

FaceBook – Undecided but I am certainly going to take a closer look. I think it will swim…at least for the next year.

Mahalo – Agree…one quick visit and the first impression is overwhelming, “What? Another one of these things?” Doesn’t instantly differentiate itself from everything else out there.

ConceptShare – First I’ve heard of it, but it sounds very promising. I’ll have to take a closer look. Thanks for the tip.

The footers, though, are nothing at all alike. Yours show 12 blogs with the 5 most recent posts. All SEO’d and all that jazz. Ours is an AJAX-driven footer that lets you explore the entire network, see all the blogs, explore the most recent content, etc.

I’ll give you that the designs are similar. I’ll even give you the header bar (even though it was something I’ve been using for a decade). Because to visually look at them that’s easy to see.

But the footers are totally different. Honestly, feel free to click through to http://www.ensight.org (my site, so I’m not promoting something off topic) and look at the footer. Then look at http://www.joystiq.com (a site I’m a daily reader of) and feel free to illuminate me on the similarities.

The only ones I can see are “shows other content” and “is square”.

;-)

Anyways, as I said you can say you inspired the early versions of b5, but “carbon copy” is just too much of a stretch even for you mate :)

I don’t mind you two duking it out here but please don’t bring me into a WIN-b5media skirmish as that has nothing to do with my post or anything I’ve said up to this time.

2. You’re right there are only so many ways to design something… so, again, I don’t have a problem with you guys copying what we’re doing.. i just find it ironic that Aaron is sticking it to Mahalo when he works for a company that is a photocopy of the one we did in 2003.

3. I am already very impressed with what B5 has done. I think you guys are in the top 10 blog networks after Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker and that’s significant.

j

In terms of design, I think you’ll have a hard time making the argument that a 3-column design with an ad up top is something you guys pioneered.

As far as the footer, not entirely sure how ours could be farther from WIN’s? Maybe you’re thinking of other networks that are copying yours (because there are many). We never used your style of footer.

That said, there are similarities. Design-wise, there are only so many ways to coherently present a large variety of sites, specific ad formats, etc.

End of the day, they’re fundamentally different models (that we disagree on), totally different approaches to advertising (2-3 ads vs 7-12), and (very soon) an entirely different approach to the interaction that happens on blogs.

Again, I’ll always give you credit for kicking things off, but I’ll also always stop you short of saying every network is some kind of carbon copy of WIN.

Either way, let’s talk in 4-5 months and I’m sure that I’ll have a higher opinion of Mahalo (as it’s matured) and you’ll have a higher one of b5 (ditto) :)

1.you took the “ad slice” promotional slice from the top of our blogs.

2. You took our format of on fat column + medium rectangle with two columns below it.

3. You took our promotional grid from the bottom of the page.

I could like 20 things… easily.

I know about these three off the top of my head because i designed these three items myself when build Weblogs, Inc. and I watch you guys take each them.

Again, I’m fine with that. I do think you guys have done your own thing by splitting the categories we had on blogs into their own blogs (i.e. TV shows specific blog vs. a TVBlog)… of course, as we’ve discussed I think it’s a mistake to do that, but smart folks can disagree.

Also, for the record, over dinner with your VCs they told me that what attracted them your deal was what Weblogs, Inc. had done.

so, let’s be real dude…

j

I give all credit where it’s due for kicking off the blog network thing, but that doesn’t mean you get all credit for everything done in the industry since it started.

1. We should have WORDPRESS…. I’ll get that done today for you. Netscape vs. WordPress is a moot point… we will have both in the first year of building this out. it’s a loooooooong process to build a search index.

2. It’s in Alpha so you’re not going to get a lot of hits that you should. Right now there are 7,000 pages. We will have 25,000 next year and it will feel a lot different.

3. if we don’t have a result we give things that *might* be related and Google, so there is nothing lost… and the gain is huge if we do have a result.

4. We are paying people to build pages, yes. Full-time people and part-time people (in the GReenhouse: http://greenhouse.mahalo.com).

5. We are not looking to have every page… we want to do the top 1/3rd of search terms–where there is most spam.

6. Re: conflict of interest we have an ethics and COI policy. So, we will avoid these problems just like a newspaper, wikipedia, or out bloggers did: hire ethical people, check their work, fire people who break the rules quickly.

7. In terms of “selling” you on competence it should be fairly easy to see the difference between any health SERP on Google/Yahoo/Ask and ours. About.com and Wikipedia don’t have pages on most items–but they are still valuable. So, you don’t have to have EVERYTHING in order to be valuable.

Take a look at Mahalo in a year and i think you’ll get it. Right now you need to have a lot of vision to see what it will be like when we release the other 90% of the project.

best j

I appreciate you stopping by and leaving your comment. I have used Mahalo and find it tremendously lacking. For instance, if I search for things that everyday people might search for, I get no Mahalo search results. But I do get suggestions as to what I might mean. -500 points for assuming things about the users search and not actually providing results for the search itself.

Let’s try sex offenders for the first search. Mahalo has no results but suggests sex and the city searches, The Sex Pistols and birth control injections.

Hardly what I was looking for (or even close).

Let’s do another search. Maybe I am thinking about buying a new vehicle and want ssome information on the 2008 Chevy Tahoe Hybrid. Google has 651k results. Mahalo has no results but makes some good suggestions. Unfortunately, the suggestions they make provide broad information about the Tahoe and certainly not anything specific to the Hybrid model.

Okay, you might say it’s in Alpha. I’ll give you that. You need time to fill out the results. So let’s try something more in our niche of both social media and blogging. Let’s search for WordPress. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Oh, but there is a suggested link to Netscape. Go figure. It’s a CalaCompany. Mahalo does give equal time by suggesting that maybe I was looking for Digg or Reddit – but no, those suggestions are nowhere near.

Then there’s the question of how you’re producing your results.

1. Are you paying people to come up with these results? If so, where do you draw the line in terms of economic efficiency vs ROI? How on earth can you pay enough people to produce a relevant result set that actually is quality for unknown quantities of topics in the world?

2. How do you augment the human factor of human bias about what is relevant and what is not. How do you prevent conflict of interest? Google has not disclosed it’s algorithm for search relevancy, yet we trust that it is by and large not created by hand with the intervention of human bias?

3. How do you “sell” me on competency and relevancy when you cannot produce real results on (I would argue) most search topics, yet you are not at all worried about selling sponsored placement (Adsense?) instead?

Questions demand answers. ;-)

Seriously, if you want to understand why people need us do a search on iPhone, Paris Hotels, and Breast Cancer on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN and compare the results to Mahalo.com’s. You’ll see quickly that we are spam free, more organized, and have better links.. in other words we save people time and help them find high-quality information. That’s how you win on the web (that’s why blog networks won fyi).

best j