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.

I love studies and I love experiments.  I don’t love reading through piles of boring data — but I like the idea of having an idea, testing it out, and then having something to show for it.  Sure, it might not be all that rigorous, but at least its there, and you’re saying something with some order of proof — rather than just blowing smoke out of your proverbial sphincter.

Take for instance this study at the Pennsylvania State University.  They studied how important branding was with Search Engines.  While they don’t make any of their methodology available (therefore making it hard to really assess the strength of a study), I think there’s a great point.

Branding plays a *big* role in a great many things, and search engines are no exception.

Specifically, something marketing folk like to call “top of mind awareness”, or “top of mind recall”, but also how people think about, re-arrange and re-order their perceptions of things.  And in this case, its search engines.

The summary is that they took identical search engine results and ascribed the results to four different search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search, and some in-house search engine.  When asked which results were the best, its absolutely no surprise that people favoured the ones labeled “Google” and “Yahoo” even though the search results were identical.

And I think this highlights the absolute futility in trying to unseat Google or even Yahoo as a search engine.

Even if your results *are* better, you are fighting a battle of perceptions and reputation.  Its not just an issue of building a better mouse trap.  The “install” base for Google / Yahoo is just overwhelming, and sad to say — they got there first.  If you need a better example of a mediocre products trumping better ones, business history is littered with them.  Look no further  than Microsoft and Apple.  The qwerty keyboard.  Man, it goes on.

Now, that’s not to say that you can’t make a good living or a good company with an average search engine.  Don Dodge’s math pegs 1% of the search market as being worth about a billion dollars.  My math isn’t all that great, but even if he’s wrong by a factor of ten … that’s still 100 million dollars.

If you’re willing to settle for being a 1% company, then that’s fine.  I hope that’s fine with Ask.com, for example or Mahalo.  But unless there is a seismic shift in perceptions, probably both of the search industry at large *and* your company,  you’ll never unseat Google.  That is to say, there would need to be the public perception (fomented by you — or not) that there is something seriously wrong with Google, COUPLED with the perception that your search engine is the answer.

If you can’t do both of these things, then be happy with your share of the search engine pie.  Even small pieces are worth a lot of cash.

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.

Ok, that’s not fair. Yahoo! did try and buy Facebook for a rumoured one billion dollars, and Mark Zuckerberg allegedly turned him down.

But I’ll take the bait and I’ll say it: Yahoo!’s alleged change in strategy is a smart one.

No one is ever going to out-search Google (sorry Mr. Calacanis). So it makes a lot of sense that Yahoo!, even its all of its storied Web 1.0 glory, shed any pretense of trying.

What Yahoo!, I think, is trying to say, is that when you look at the trends in what younger folk are doing, they are all migrating to social networks. From totally anecdotal evidence (someone point me to a Forrester Report), more and more people are doing the majority of their online work through online networks. And it seems like the younger you are, the more likely that you’re actually happy living in these walled-in communities if (and that’s a heavy if), all of your friends are there already.

It seems peculiar, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard myself and from others, how some teenagers, or even folks in their early twenties, don’t use email. Or instant messaging systems. They only and exclusively use the communication tools within their social network of choice — whether it be Facebook or Myspace or what have you.

Let’s cue in Cynthia Brumfield of IPDemocracy, who at Mesh said (and I live blogged this) :

CB: I have a teenage daughter, and they will be happy to wander in enclosed spaced. First its myspace, then it was xanga, now its facebook. They don’t seem to want to cruise and do what people in their 20’s do. They don’t do email — they do instant messaging.

How about putting it another way?

They don’t use email — so they don’t really use Gmail as much as their internal messaging systems.

And they don’t really use search to find stuff unless they really need to — like Google, but they’d rather stick to doing fun things in their own walled gardens.

So I’ll buy the argument that the future isn’t search.

But what’s Yahoo! really going to do to win this new priority in personalization and — in my opinion — social networks?

It seems like Yahoo’s new venture into this space will be called “Front Doors”. Will it be through a portal system? Another “My Yahoo” attempt? And speaking of mediocrity, they’ve done a bang up job of acquiring seemingly smart Web2.0 companies with a predilection towards community and royally twiddling their fingers about it. Duplication of services about amongst other things — and what about MyBlogLog? The ultimate superspatial layer for the blogosphere? Where does that figure into the move towards personalization?

And really — what about the giant elephant in the room?

What about Facebook?

Is Yahoo!’s product going to be so good its going to steal people away from Facebook or MySpace? Some might argue its a zero-sum game, but let’s be honest here. It makes no sense to join another network if none of your friends are on it.

I’m all for Yahoo! changing gears — but manifesto’s aside (even the Peanut Butter ones) — its going to take some extra special stuff to take on the current challengers in this space. I’m eager to see how it turns out, because, let’s be honest, the whole Yahoo vs. Google thing was getting a little tired.

Yahoo vs. Facebook, though?

Now, that’s getting interesting.

It seems like the world of technology — the world that I write about and care about, anyway — has cruelly decided to explode in a supernova of news in the past 48 hours while I’ve been away at Mesh. Anyway, some thoughts on some of the larger bits of news over the past few days that I haven’t yet commented on — but will do so if I have the time.

• Google launched Google Gears, a plugin (how simple!) which allows people to take online data offline. I think that the importance of this release cannot be overestimated. Although Gears is a product that is agnostic with respect to particular web applications, clearly Google is positioning itself to move its own Google Applications offline. This has enormous consequences, and most importantly from the way that it positions Google as a direct competitor to Microsoft as it applies to Office products. With the way that its secretly building data centers and locking up dark fibre so that it can solidify its on-line offerings, Google is a behemoth that is moving and evolving faster than, I think, many can hardly imagine.
• Jason Calacanis launches Mahalo, a human-filtered search engine that seems to use a combination of Wikipedia, Google Search Results, and hand picked terms to populate its index. On one hand I can see the attraction for wanting to do this — common search tems can often get clouded by “irrelevant” stuff — on the other hand, I just don’t know what the objective is. Do they think they’re going to out-Google google? Are they trying to penetrate a niche market? If I want information on popular terms why not just go to Wikipedia? In any of those cases it becomes a branding issue — but Google *already* owns what people think of in terms of search, and Wikipedia *already* owns the concept of common ideas, things, places, people, and so on.
• Bill Gates and Steve Jobs shared a stage for the first time in recent memory — and it seems like people, such as Om Malik, think that it was the ever personable Jobs who was clearly the most memorable … for all kinds of reasons. Which brings me to a thought: what would ever happen to Apple if they lost Steve Jobs? No, seriously. Do they have any kind of insurance policy for that circumstance? What do you think Apple’s market cap would do *then*?
• EMI allows YouTube to broadcast its music videos and Apple officially releases DRM free music: Big sounding developments from the arena of copyright and legal wranglings — but as Ethan Kaplan pointed out yesterday about DRM-less music at Mesh, you wonder if its going to make much of a difference towards anything. DRM-less music is more appealing but it still has to compete with free music. YouTube can now allow people to release music videos from EMI’s library — but who watches music videos any more? No, seriously — who does? I’ll give my stock standing-on-the-fence type answer: “time will tell” … but it would be interesting if it didn’t make any difference at all in the long term.
• YouTube on AppleTV? Its happening, now. I can’t help but wonder if this is as lame as it sounds; on one hand it kind of makes sense — on the other, are people really going to be interested watching grainy 30 second clips of human inanity on their 40 / 50″ television screen? I mean its one thing to watch it if you’re in a constant state of partial attention (like at your PC multi-tasking), but its another to sit in front of your TV and do it — with nothing else niggling for your your attention.
• RealNetworks has released a new Real Player that will allow you to download almost any streaming format, from flash, to YouTube videos, to Real Media and Windows Media. I think the biggest hurdle they’re going to have is in the early adopter circles — not the technology itself. Real Media player was probably one of the first pieces of bloatware, coupled with a terrible consumer experience married to an ongoing contempt for what users seemingly want. And it lasted that way for years. Everyone knows it and everyone remembers it. But it seems like they’re doing what Dell has done — they’ve put a face to the company, they’ve started a blog and they’ve started admitting their mistakes. It’ll be interesting to see if it works, as there’s a lot of negativity about the brand — but certainly no more than Dell.
• Zooomr Mark III still isn’t up.