Offering a Bet On Mahalo
In my earlier posts on Mahalo this week, I looked at it from a user and non-tech developer point of view. What I posted was essentially a personal review based on my interpretation of the way that Jason has been describing it. The term ombudsman definitely gave me the wrong impression, since it implies the existence of a community/citizenry requiring such representation.
This original misimpression of what Mahalo is, so far, sparked a strong interest on my part. It led me to think that, finally, I glimpsed the possibility of what I firmly believe many people would welcome, namely a public community where individual interests can connect, merge, and overlap with those of others.
There is a ‘community’ building Mahalo, in classic crowdsourcing tradition, which means mostly drawn from the .001%. Will that change? Possibly, based on drawing in students who always need a few bucks. That’s actually a brilliant little bit of strategy.
Mahalo may be more of a links directory than anything else, but the reality is that one of the most wonderful resources that most of us valued, before the marriage of search and marketing drowned a lot of them, were those fabulous link pages that so many individuals contributed and maintained for the love of it. In a way, Mahalo is aimed at rebuilding that sort of resource, to the power of 1000. I can even see this making a dent in the Joneser and Boomer markets, if the category development doesn’t end up skewing too young.
Looking at Mahalo objectively as a business offering, I’m making a bet that it will be successful, with success defined in the usual terms of adoption, eyeballs and valuation. It doesn’t have to take over all of search, or do unrealistic things such as displace Google, to be a winner.
Loser pays an “I was wrong” post. Any takers?
