More Musing on Mahalo
Madan Pandit of Textual Analytics Solutions emailed me a link to Rich Skrenta’s post on Mahalo yesterday. This afternoon I caught up on others, including more of Jason Calacanis’s, those of Dave Winer, of Dave Sifry, of Andy Beard, and even the amusing Valleywag outing of uncov.
The only post talking about any aspect of the user (and potential contributor) point of view that I took yesterday, was Rob La Gesse on the ombudsman subject. Rob contended that if an ombudsman is hired by the company, then that person has to be in the position to speak only for the community whose interests he represents, and, perhaps more importantly, has to be listened to.
To the encounter with Mahalo which I described yesterday, I arrived with the concept (after reading Jason’s blog) that the Mahalo content would be hand-built by and for the non-.001% of users. This naturally led me to expect that such building would be done, to at least some extent, by the 99.999%. The expectation was partly reinforced by the fact that, of the 20 or so searches I tried at different times, not one came up with a result. What I was searching were my own non-tech related interests and also those of other non-tech computer users I know (who all rely on Google). Knowing that I could contribute on a number of topics, I registered.
It seems that my initial concept of Mahalo, which envisaged a brilliant method of involving and identifying peak users in non-tech categories, who would naturally draw other users in each category, was inaccurate.
This 99.999% of the billion or so people with internet access seems rarely referred to as more than an undifferentiated mass by the .001%. They are, however, as different and individual as those who are in the .001%. More so perhaps, since even across the range of gamers and coders and telephony experts and social media-ites and entrepreneurs and investors, the .001% share a lot of common interests.
Other than marketers talking in broad generalizations, such as that a majority of online buyers are women (and a majority of techies aren’t), no tech entrepreneur I know of has considered mapping the majority in depth. Most start-ups target only a core group, small or large, based on a service or activity - a single need or desire to be met, and it was the idea that if Mahalo was for everyone it could result in the eventual emergence of a starting blueprint for a personalized global user mapping, that made me think it was brilliant.
Such a map will not emerge using current marketing tools. These rely at their root on common demographic elements which override personalization.
If you map users by traditional measurements such as time spent online, spending, age, gender, education, residence, etc. (which goals btw seem more in line with the Social Graph or Spock than Mahalo) you produce value for marketing professionals, including their clients, the vendors and advertisers, but the evolution of personalized information that would enable construction of better destinations and communities doesn’t emerge from this. A crowd-sourced construction based on individual interests and activities, however, could open the door to many future development ideas.
From this perspective I read Dave Winer’s comment that, “Bottom-line, he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that many others can profit from it. Otherwise I don’t think it has a prayer against Google”, and understood that this was what I had found exciting, a process where users would reap benefit by contributing, and could form further natural groups and communities through the process. This is also what disturbed me about the ombudsman image, which put users firmly outside a corporate wall.
I’d thought Mahalo might be the personal interest version of a Wikepedia type community, which would naturally evolve into an endless myriad of overlapping circles, rather than a conflicted skyscraper. The way I’m understanding the building of Mahalo now, is that first the .001% will build it, and will know what to build for the 999.99%, who will then arrive in droves to use it. You think?
The millions of non-tech users on eBay in its glory days or those on MySpace through its dramatic early growth, or the additional millions of bloggers offered a blank page more recently, brought their own views and interests to open spaces that grew as a result. Who decided or really knew in advance the scope of what they’d want to do? Who realized what further growth (beyond cashing out) could be enabled for those natural congregations of individuals?
What makes the internet different that any other medium is that it is personal and interactive, and can grow from that level in an organic manner. I don’t happen to believe that personal and interactive can’t scale, only that we have not yet learned how to enable it to. This kind of scaling, in my view, cannot be accomplished by massing larger numbers of people into a depersonalized mass, but rather via enabling a dynamic growth process within which endless groups can evolve and overlap, just as communities do naturally in large urban centers. Search/info by itself would not necessarily be the perfect or only starting point for such growth, but it could certainly be one of them.
There is also a secondary aspect of Mahalo which I responded to, and this was the potential of real valuation of reputation and development of trust. These two valuable words have been turned into buzz words everywhere we turn in this web 2.0 world. When I first came to Lijit (which I think is supposed to evoke ‘legit’) last year, the word trust stood out front and center. So in I went, wandering around, and discovered that everyone there was anonymous and that there were no forums or other venues for getting to know people. When I inquired about this, I was told that the idea was that I should bring friends I trust to join me there, but I could not understand why I would do so. Squidoo originally struck me much the same way. Every lens I found of interest was written by an ‘expert’ …using a pseudonym. This reputation and trust aspect of compiled information on any topic is worth further thought in regard to Mahalo, or any other site with big growth plans. Even if you have real experts using their real names, unless they are truly famous across many fields of interest, or at least extensively credentialed, their authority will not be easy to establish with strangers.
