Amazing how Mahalo Share works screencast by ShawnSmith (shawnsmith's blog):



Thanks a lot Shawn!

There are two features I really hate about Facebook:

1. Email alerts that force you to come back to the website. When someone posts to a wall, sends you a note, or posts do a group Facebook will send you a notification. That's great, except the notification email is like ten lines long and contains everything BUT THE MESSAGE. Here's the standard message... it's just such a waste of time.... UGH!!!

• Cathleen wrote something on the Wall for the event "Blogger Dinner & Drinks.
  
  To see what Cathleen wrote, follow the link below:
  http://www.facebook.com/n/?event.php&eid=19192752832#wall_posts
  
  Thanks,
  
  The Facebook Team
  ___
  
  Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to:
  http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

2. Having to autoconfirm each friend request with a two step process. UGH. Can't I just accept folks like on Pownce with one click without all this fancy popup nonsense!?!?!? It's such a waste of time.

I think Facebook is moving away from their efficient design and starting to get caught up in the short-term page view trap. I'm sure someone doesn't want to send the notes saying "oh, 8% of our traffic comes from those notes!" What they don't realize is that folks might use Facebook 20x more for emailing notes if it wasn't so horribly designed. Also, folks might add more friends, more often if it wasn't so poorly designed.

If you want to build the best social network out there make it the easiest to use with the least page view refreshes. Please God.

{saving time by hartichocked via CC }

I get these great emails and IMs from Web 2.0 folks all the time. As I've said before some services are designed for the top .001% of the market and some are designed for the "the market." That's one of the things I learned a lot about while at Graduate school (also known as my 12 months @ AOL LLC). There is a very large market out there for internet services and that market is filled with folks who want simple, easy to use services that they trust.

Mahalo was designed for those folks. If you love submitted stories to digg, load TechMeme 12x day, and have over ten Facebook applications installed you're probably not the target market for these simple services--and that's totally cool! Some folks are cutting edge, few folks are bleeding edge, and most folks are just getting on with their life.

Anyway, here's today's IM that made me really smile:

• Hey, thought you might like a quick perspective I heard yesterday. Talking to a local friend of mine (40-50) who takes a lot of holidays and was complaining about how hard it is to find good travel on Google (hotels, destinations etc SEOd to death).
  
  I showed him Mahalo and he was blown away... he was wondering if he could pay money for it or something. He was amazed something so useful was free to use. He was really happy to save, literally, hours of painful Google research for his next few trips.
  
  so you know you're doing something right when the typical 'man on the street' is excited for Mahalo and adds it to his bookmarks.
  

Couple of important points in this anecdote:

1. Human's curating search can save other humans a LOT of time.
2. Certain verticals benefit more from human curation: travel, products, news, and health come to mind.
3. When people love a service they bookmark it. That's the Holy Grail of product design, getting someone to bookmark your service.
4. People do pay for the service Mahalo provides for free currently: they pay for it with THEIR time. They pay for by asking their loved ones or employees to do research. We save folks a LOT of time and money, and if you create a service that does that you're going to have an impact.

Anyway, I love these stories... so, if you want to conduct a little experiment forget about the hype around human search, SEO, and my public persona--that's all meaningless. Sit one of your friends or family members down and show them one of our search results next to Google, Yahoo, or Ask and watch the magic happen.

If I had not have done tons of market research in this fashion (including with out in-house testing lab) I would not have even started Mahalo (let alone raised capital to go after this market). At this point in my career I put my faith not in what A-List bloggers and pundits think, I put my faith in my I see in user labs. Pundits don't know jack about the market, the MARKET knows about the market (and you can include me in that pundit list... if you consider me a pundit).

Hope everyone is having a great weekend... I'm suffering with a throbbing jaw and mouth sores. Pass the vicodin.



{ vicodin by prodigal via CC }

A lot of folks have been telling me their emailing and IMing Mahalo links around the web--especially for things like travel and people like their parents (btw: your parents will love Mahalo).

A number of folks asked us why we didn't have social sharing sites like delicious, reddit, Facebook, and Stumbleupon. We thought about that for a second and realized there was no reason why we didn't have those services so we just added them under the "clean URLs."

[ Sidenote: Clean URLs is our project to make the shortest possible URLs for folks who like to type in mahalo.com/SEARCHTERM. I'm one of these odd folks who likes to save a couple of keystrokes. ]

We didn't add Netscape or digg because those sites specialize in news and we thought the communities there might not be interested in sharing curated search results. If we're wrong I'm sure we'll find out when people post our curated results to those services.

They have a group for another social networking site with 3,500 members!!! How meta is that!?!?!? Facebook features are so tight that people from ASmallWorld would rather network on Facebook with the ASW icon.... wow. Like wow wow.

• On the heals of YouTube cleaning up its act, MySpace will delete 200,000 objectionable profiles. Ross comments on making the Space more advertiser friendly--very, very smart move.
  
• The PVR is the network--wow.
• Apple *desktop* marketshare has been cut in half since Jobs became CEO... misleading headline since Apple is doing better than ever in terms of the overall health of the company. In related note, how would you like to be the CEO of Disney and have Steve Jobs show up at the next board meeting?!?! Oh to be a fly on that wall.
  
• John Battelle begs the founders of Facebook to take the money--spoken like a true vet who got hit hard when the bubbles popped. JBAT was at WIRED which had an IPO killed twice, and at the Industry Standard which he says turned down a similar offer (so that means the Standard got a ~1B offer and they didn't take it.... ouch!). I hear ya buddy... I've had three phone calls with entrepreneurs who've been offered 5-30M for their startups in the past month. My advice to all of them: sell now, Internet winter is coming. Here is how the conversation went with one of my friends:
  

Me: "Have you ever sold a company?"

Friend with offer: "No."

Me: "Do you TKTK million in you bank account right now?"

FWO: "No."

Me: "Are your parents going to put TKTK million in your bank account any time soon? Do you have a trust fund?"

FWO: "Uhhh... no."

Me: "Take the money."

FWO: "But what if I sell to early?"

Me: "Then you've done your job. You have three options in life: sell too early, sell exactly at the right moment, or sell too late. You want to be part of the first two groups--not the last group. And, history is the only thing that can tell you if you're in group 1 or 2. Trust me, I spent my life in group 3, now I'm part of group 1, and maybe some day I'll be able to join Mark Cuban in group 2. Heck, folks may look back at the blogging movement and say that we were in group #2. It's a process, and if you're a first time entrepreneur you take the money and hope the distance between group 1 and 2 isn't that big. Risk, reward."

Me (still going): "Trust me, get one under your belt--it changes everything. I get 10 calls a week from VCs asking me to invest in my next company... it's like the movie business: once you've made one movie your chances of doing a second movie go up exponentially."

[ Note: Mark had a solid sale before he had Broadcast.com, so when Microsoft offered him ~$100 for Broadcast.com he could walk away from it. That's the position you want to be in. Having a win under your belt changes *everything.* ]

Was just trading emails with some folks about social networks.

The big problem with social networks is the business model. It is clear that users are not willing to pay for social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster. If any of these sites started charging they would be replaced with a free option. That leaves advertising as the business model.

However, when people are on social networks they have two choices:

1. Interact with people: flirt, find a date, find a mate, hook up, make friends, etc.
2. Click on advertisements.

Very few advertisers are going to be able to beat out the desire for people to hook up--unless of course they have a better way to hook people up with other people. For example an advertisement on MySpace for Match.com that says "meet people in your zip code" might actually convert well since folks are in the "hook up" mindset.

Compare that to people being on a vertical content site like Autoblog. When you're on autoblog you're in "consume auto information" mind set. As such, you're highly likely to click on an advertisement from VW or BMW. Reading the ads in a car magazine is as interesting--many times--as reading the stories. Sometimes the ads have better information, and they certainly have better photography.

This takes nothing away from social networks and their amazing traffic. However, the fact is social networking is a bust for advertisers today. We've seen this before with chat rooms, listsrvs, message boards, and email clients. They are amazing for traffic, and they are horrible for advertising.

If social networks are going to work for marketers they are going to have to nuke the current model for advertising and do something much more creative.... creative enough to trump the value of hooking up.

I'm glad I'm not in the social networking business... then again, it would be a challenge, and I'm always up for a challenge.