Usenet? Killed by spam. Google? Search has been diluted by comment spam. Squidoo? Overwhelmed by affiliate spam.
Those issues were at the heart of a presentation by Jason Calacanis, late of Weblogs Inc and now behind Mahalo. And he had a warning for internet businesses:
"You can't pretend you don't see the abuse so you can make money," he said.
Another example he gave of spam polluting Technorati - do a search for "Paris Hotels" - all you get is spam hosted on Blogger. Dave Sifry and Evan Williams, "nice, clever guys" who are (formerly?) friends of Calacanis created a system that can be abused for spam.
Some people (like the spammers and those who tolerate them) think that because you can do something technically on the internet you have every right.
Google is starting to smack down spam, but it's still an issue - affiliate links.
Calacanis had some suggestions for the attendees about how to manage this:
- Build curation into your service.
- Police your service
- Reduce anonymity without reducing freedom
- Punish bad people
Users have to "own your words". The movement is away from fake people: MySpace had loads, Facebook had less, LinkedIn has none.
He also gave us a quick demo of Mahalo's new social element. It's already a human-powered search engine - ie real people rather than algorithms are behind the results. The new element appears to bring link sharing/recommending to social groups. It could be more than that - I'll play with it later to see.
What's the benefit to new companies of following his suggestions? "Nobody wants to buy real estate in a town filled with toxic waste," Calacanis replied. "There's a small amount of pain to go green."
The best quote of all? "As internet people, we shouldn't bother with people who don't understand the internet, because they'll be dead soon."
December 12, 2007 6:36 PM | Reply
Mihalo is quite nice if you are searching for something that someone has set up some links for:
http://www.mahalo.com/New_york_hotel
but kind of sucks if you are searching for something that no-one has:
http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Search?search=baby+hiccups&go=Web+Search
http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Search?search=betty+davis&go=Web+Search
http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Search?search=gilles+peterson&go=Web+Search
(using my last three searches on google as an example)
Since searching implies you are looking for something you don't know about I'm not sure social search really works on a horizontal level, although vertically it might be more effective (baby.mihalo or music.mihalo) and get more recommendations / interaction