There were a lot of people, who, about a year ago made a lot of noises about how Jason Calacanis’s next project, wasn’t going to work (me included). Human edited directories will never ride in this day of automated algorithmic Google-ish-ness, and paying people to do be mechanical turk behind the scenes, grinding out said automation under the banner of a “social network” would be giant financial sinkhole.

Well, I was wrong.

I think.

According to Compete.com’s numbers, Mahalo has shown incredible growth since its inception, and has month after month continued to grow without difficulty. And this is without ads on-line, or off-line.

On the surface, it seems like natural growth, aided and abetted by Mahalo’s growing social network, Mahalo Social, as well as Mahalo Greenhouse, where people are paid based on the number of pages they help edit, not including of course, its daily video they produce, Mahalo Daily, with Veronica Belmont. Things like “socializing” Mahalo’s search by combining its social network *with* its greenhouse (your profile will improve with the amount of help you provide to editing edit and build its index) will probably help as well.

Or maybe Jason Calacanis is finally collecting his marker from Satan.

… I’m KIDDING of course (although I’m pretty sure many folks at the Affiliate Summit are not, in their very vocal vitriol).

Irrespective of the reason, Mahalo is growing like a weed and without acknowledging its success when you criticize its underlying philosophy … — well, that’s just being a tad dickish (btw, that’s “epitome”, not “impidimy”).

Congratulations, Jason. Its been almost a year, and Mahalo is doing just great. I’m eating crow, and I’m happy to do so.

Looks like the A-lister brigade is out in force against the opt-in lunacy that is Facebook Beacon. Or, so it would seem, anyway, with Doc Searls, Dave Winer, and Jason Calacanis (and a few others) making some good ol’ impassioned pleas To Do The Right Thing, as this kind of default opt-in status is deceptive, and as Mr. Calacanis eloquently puts it (and I suggest this without a hint of sarcasm) they are Data Hogs as they are “amassing tons of information, selling it under false pretense, and not sharing it with the folks who gave it to them”.

It all makes sense to me, of course.

Will it make sense — as well as the real essence of their cri de coeur — to … say, for instance my *brother*? Or my wife? Or, my non-tech friends? How about *your* non-tech friends?

I mean, will average Facebookers care?

Will they care that Facebook isn’t making available in an easy XML format a copy of all of their data and transactions, available for download at a push of a button? That Facebook is actively scouring the transactions of their life so that it might be monetized now — or later, for that matter?

Let’s phrase it another way.

Do average Facebookers know or care that almost everything they upload *TO* Facebook is then *owned* by Facebook? That everything could be used / potentially abused / sold off in all kinds of ways that makes Facebook Beacon sound like of kindergardenish?

Let’s boil it down even more.

Do you think most Facebook users have even *thought* about reading the Terms of Service?

In an age where we *still* — and will *continue* to until our children our teenagers — read about how an individual’s silly exploits become public knowledge unbeknownst to them, and that news about potentially indiscrete activities could jeopardize your current and future job prospects are still very much News …

The answer to all of the above questions is “Average Facebook users neither know, nor care about the intricacies and *importance* of owning, tending, and guarding, one’s personal data, information, and relationships — unless it directly and overtly impacts their own personal sense of privacy today.”

And Facebook knows it.

In fact, its billion dollar valuation hinges on it.

It hinges on the fact that somewhere deep inside Facebook, I am sure that marketers and venture capitalists are cooking up ways to milk the herd of all its worth without actually alerting the herd to what its doing.

You know, like that privacy thing about the news feed about a year ago.

And that’s all that it really boils down to.

As long as enough people don’t notice or complain about these issues around Facebook nothing will be done. Its in Facebook’s best interests, in fact, that nothing be done.

Getting back to the point at hand, though. Will the cries of the blogging intelligentia be *enough* to galvanize forces within and throughout Facebook? Maybe. Perhaps if there are enough slow news days in the upcoming days and weeks, this could get enough publicity in the mainstream media — via MoveOn.org, for example — for it to catalyze change through public pressure.

But methinks that best way it *could* be done is through a grassroots means *within* Facebook. Someone has to start a group — someone with thousands of friends (like, the limit — 5000) who knows thousands of other connectors — to spread the word.

Because it has to be an attitudinal change, really. And that’s hard to do when its coming from an outside force — it really has to come from within.

You know what I mean.

Getting people curious about what Facebook is really about and what they’re really doing.

Get people interested about what they’re giving up in exchange so that they don’t have to go through the onerous task of actually *emailing* people, but messaging them through Facebook.

Because only if we’re able to do that *first*, will we able to get people to care about Facebook handing over all their data.

Without caring about what Facebook can or can do, and what it does and doesn’t own, nobody will ever want to know or care about these other shenannigans, which make sense to you and I.

But not, say, people like my brother.

And perhaps your brother too.

Update:  Apparently official communications were such that Scouts were in fact told of the upcoming changes.

Some sad (or happy, depending on your point of view) news coming out of AOL this morning: they plan to scuttle Jason Calacanis’s social legacy by moving the “social” version of netscape (read: “you can vote on stories … like Digg”) off to a sub domain and have the original domain serving up an old fashion portal, circa 1999.

Wait — that’s not entirely fair … Yahoo.com also serves up a portal, as does MSN.com, and its 2007.

Why am I *not* skewering these URL’s (and their parent companies), but critical of Netscape?

Why am I *not* relishing in this apparent giant vote of non-confidence of AOL in this apparent, but tarnished, clone of Digg? (if paying people to moderate is tarnishing, that is). Something that many, about a year ago, clamoured *would* fail?

Only because unlike its other two towering bretheren, until quite recently — actually, until last year, when the new “social” version of Netscape debut’d — Netscape.com’s own traffic was in a tailspin. It only flattened out when it changed its focus to a “Digg clone”.

So yes, it looks like the higher ups at AOL aren’t quite happy enough with “bringing things out a fatal nosedive”, and want to stick with a strategy that a) everyone else is already doing and b) something that was in place *while* Netscape *was* in a nosedive.

Its what’s called a “safe” bet, I suppose, doing what everyone else is doing — but sadly, its a defensive measure that won’t, I predict, win any great strides amongst every day net users(no matter what their data shows), nor, of course, any “leet” early adopters.

[As a post script, I do realize that the “social” netscape will be moved to another subdomain (or its own domain), and that we’ve been “tantalized” with new features (according to the blog post). On the other hand, it seems like keeping one’s own employees is de rigeur this week. The navigators that I’ve spoken to (and there aren’t that many that I know) seemed to have been kept in the dark as to these changes. Which, perhaps, tells you how confident they are in these changes and the social netscape. Or, perhaps, that they’re merely lousy at internal communications].

I was about to comment on the whole slapfest at Gnomedex, relishing in the fact, of course, that I am on the other side of the continent, and am absolutely unqualified to write about any of the high school drama going on.

However, I did stumble upon Ethan Kaplan’s blog today — the chap who was at Mesh this year, and who is also the head technology guy for Warner Bros., and who is also wicked smart (who writes a great angry blog — not always angry, but angry sometimes in a good way), and I think he pretty much sums up a lot of sentiment in one sentence:

We pay attention to some stupid fight between overweight white guys inside a conference hall, where outside there are significant problems that we ignore for the sake of our own false prophet building.

Allen Stern remarked over at Mat Ingram’s blog: “ever notice that the drama centers around less than 5 people?”

I think the answer is an unequivocal “YES”. Which should be followed up by an addendum. “Said drama is almost always self-centered navel gazing, which often has no bearing outside of the self-centered navel gazing technology side of the blogosphere.” [yours truly sometimes guilty of that too, however].

For those who follow popular tech bloggers (and I expect most, if not all of you do, if you’re reading this blog), there have been two interesting posts within the last 48 hours few days or so.

One involves Jason Calacanis who has decided to declare Facebook Bankruptcy over how many people are pinging him via Facebook Apps, wherein he’s basically thrown up his hands and has given up. (Boo hoo, I’m too popular). The other involves Mike Arrington’s post over at TechCrunch where he details how there is a burgeoning business in trying to monetize Facebook applications — most noticeably (for me) through selling ad space *on* Facebook applications.

Both of these posts taken together portent a potential backlash coming at Facebook applications, and no, I don’t mean just the usual fooferah around Facebook Bankruptcy. This is how.

• Everyone and their sister is drooling over the possibility over creating an application that has the viral potential to be “signed up” by millions of people almost over night.
• There are many ways to potentially monetize Facebook applications, and a popular one seems to be advertising.
• Facebook applications seem like a fantastic opportunity for advertisers (and Facebook app owners) because many Facebook users have not altered their privacy settings, and therefore many applications have access to demographic drill-down type data that advertisers crave.
• The problem is that many Facebook users, have, in fact, not yet noticed that they are being targeted in this fashion — and I suspect that many, when they will, will not like it.
• Furthermore, many Facebook users, particularly users of widg– I mean, applications — are also probably not fond of the whole idea of applications trying to sell ad space on *their profile*, essentially monetizing their activities (and in a circular way, their friends) absolutely gratis.
• Add to this supposition that Facebook applications have been multiplying like weeds, I suspect many Facebook users — particularly the hyper connected ones, such as Mr. Calacanis — are probably getting fed up with these little applications. Signed up users for applications is one thing, but active and retained users are another.
• If my presumptions about Facebook users are true, we could see a time very soon when a great deal of Facebook users will realize that a great deal of coin is being made off of their profiles, using their demographics, in applications that were not previously used as platforms for displaying ads, on a social networking site that has been generally inconspicuous with ads, which is now seeing an overproliferation of applications, creating a widespread ennui of “poke-itis”.
• And if this is the case, we might in fact, see a backlash against these applications, and an en-masse signing off or removing of Facebook applications.

Now, we already had a meme going on about Facebook bankruptcy this past weekend, with several prominent tech bloggers proclaiming how useful — or not — it was. Surprisingly, I don’t expect much, if any, of that conversation to actually trickle down to the everyday Facebook user, since it is so mainstream (at least in Toronto).

Much ado about nothing really.

What will be much more interesting is if there is a real user backlash, in real aggregate numbers, around Facebook Applications. I don’t know who or what will set it off, but all it may take is a few hyperconnected nodes — er, users — to realize what is happening, put the dots together, and set a few groups going on the topic.

A few tech bloggers discussing about Facebook Bankruptcy is one thing. A revolt against the wholesale selling of adspace on personal profiles — by a second hand party, no less — with none of it going back to the profile “owner” is another thing entirely.

Spock.com, is a startup that I briefly touched on some time ago.  Sure there was a bit of controversy around some verbal gaffe’s the founders made, but there hasn’t been too much positive buzz around this application in a while.  Read/Write Web has a new review which is largely positive.

Having had a chance to use it now for a few weeks, I don’t disagree with the review.  In fact, its software is intuitive, and, potentially useful.  That is, I say “potentially”, because Spock.com is one of these Web2.0 application that *really* requires large scale macro-type network effects to work.

This is what I mean.

The real power in something like Spock won’t be for people who are well known/ celebrities.  Spock.com does that well.  But on the other hand, do you really need a fancy search engine to tell you that George Bush has twin daughters?

No, the real strength will be in its ability to find everyone *else*.  Friends you may have heard about, potential employers, employees, or even people you may have read about online.

To do that, it really requires a lot of data.  Lots of people inputing their own profiles.  Lots of people adding others.  And this is because although its able to mine data from social networks, like LinkedIn or MySpace, the fact is that there are still loads and loads of people that *aren’t* on those sites.

Sure, Spock.com could bank on the fact that social networking usage will rise to a high enough level that it self-populates its own database past the tipping point — but is that a viable strategy?

More to the point: what about all the non-networked information about people that is already out there?  Case in point: Mil Arcega, the guy that I was trying to look for last time.  Now, he is a former reporter for a local news station out on the West Coast.  Not exactly an unknown … but the only thing I could find was a MySpace profile on the guy, and I’m pretty sure (I really hope, rather) that it wasn’t him.

The fact that I pointed out which still remains true is that if you Google his name, there are loads of information on him.  Its just not in a social network.

I’m all for web applications that are useful.  Spock.com has a lot of potential.  It just needs to increase the available data that it has to make it useful.  Should they consider paying people a la Mahalo/ Jason Calacanis?  Or should they just bring on a Celebrity blogger like Guy Kawasaki to drum up enough buzz? I don’t know when that tipping point will occur — but it should do everything in its power to make it so.  Because without it, its really not as helpful as it could be.

Footnote: I have a WHACK load of invitations for Spock.com now.  If you’re interested in checking it out, just leave a comment and I’ll try and send everyone an invitation.