Written on June 17, 2008 – 7:30 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Wow, there’s a new trend going on in the Next Web office: making Twitter mash-ups. Last week, co-editor Boris launched Twittercounter - Feedburner for Twitter - and a few hours ago, developer Reinier Ladan (@reinier) sent me a line about his mash-up Twannabe.
Reinier thinks that a good way to find new interesting people is checking out who your hero is following. I can see why, as the guys your hero is following might be the crowd you want to be associated with. Though I’m not sure though whether Twitter followers is a good filter. Imagine for example that your web hero is Jason Calacanis. Well, then I have a news flash for you. He has an auto follow script running and currently tracks the tweets of 28,007 people. Although the Twitter API allows Twannabe to work with only 2000 contacts, it’s still a lot of people to follow.
It does work though when you change the definition. Instead of tracking down the friends of an almost unreachable Web 2.0 millionaire, you might want to see who your friends are following. Than, all of a sudden, Twannabe becomes more useful. But to be honest with you, the ‘view all’ option of Twitter does the job as well. Twannabe just creates a fun experience around it.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 1, 2008 – 2:07 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Blog hero Jason Calacanis has announced on Calacanis.com that his human-powered search engine Mahalo will embrace the Wikipedia idea of letting anyone edit any page at any time. He explains why:
Jason Calacanis and his yellow Corvette
This feature has allowed everyone to get involved, even if their contribution is bad. The brilliance of this move is that the bad editors grow to be poor editors, and then poor editors then become average editors, and over some period of time some small percentage of the bad, poor, and average editors become great.
The obvious threats
I’ve happened to see the CEO of Wikia, Gil Penchina, speaking at The Next Web conference. He said that “when giving away insane levels of control is done right, it is incredibly strong“. Though he did mention the obvious dangers of welcoming everyone as an editor. Calacanis has experienced one of this threats himself:
A month or so ago I had a huge political figure by my office and I was showing him how Wikipedia works. I change his nationality from Irish-American to Greek-American and he was stunned that the vandalism stayed up there for so long (five days). Of course, I had to change it back… so it’s possible that it could have stayed there for a month or a year.
Wikipedia 3.0
So the Mahalo CEO decided to adopt a Wikipedia 3.0 model: anyone can edit the page, but experts have the final say. These experts are Mahalo editors whose full time job is to check all the changes made by Mahalo users. Yes, I said users, because in order to edit a page, you’ll have to register first. Also, Mahalo allows companies and individuals to correct the facts on their own page.
All in all, Mahalo carefully gives their users not so insane levels of control. Let’s see how this works out. If it succeeds, more companies might embrace the wisdom of crowds while checking all of their users’ moves. It simply isn’t as scary as giving your users insane levels of control.
Written on January 29, 2008 – 8:06 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Esther Dyson laughing at Guy Kawasaki
At Techcrunch40 we watched a presentation (Follow that link for video) by ZocDoc co-founder Cyrus Massoumi. ZocDoc is an online service that lets consumers find, search and book dentist and doctor appointments. After Massoumi’s presentation Guy Kawasaki, who was one of the members of the jury, said ‘I just don’t see it. You search this site and you’re like, “Oh look, Dr. Molly Adams, she looks nice, I’ll ask her to operate on my heart.”‘. While the audience laughed Massoumi cleared his throat, grabbed the microphone and replied ‘You might ask your friend for an optometrist recommendation, but you might not ask them for someone who could diagnose the rash on your butt.”. I don’t really know why but there has been some animosity between Jason Calacanis, who was the moderator for Techcrunch40 and Kawasaki. So the crowd went wild when Kawasaki said “Sure I would. I’d call Jason (Calacanis); he’s had plenty of rashes”.
“I’d call Jason Calacanis; he’s had plenty of rashes”
Kawasaki, as you might know, is a man and not a female and that might have some influence on his opinions. Maybe. If he would have been a female there would have been a 60 percent chance he would prefer the Internet over friends, family or significant other to get medical advice. I didn’t just make that up either. Comscore asked 921 women between the ages of 18 and 44 how they choose their methods of birth control. Turns out that 82% turn to Medical Professionals (i.e. doctors, pharmacists and healthcare workers) but 60% also turns to the internet. Apparently women use all sorts of sources because 51% also asks their friends, family or significant other. Good to know that men (significant others?) are in the loop too when it concerns methods of birth control.
I hope Comscore will repeat this study with men soon so we can accurately determine if there is a future for web-based services that allow you to get medical advice via online services like via ZocDoc or the just announced and soon to launch Google Health. In case you missed it; Google announced last week that they will soon launch Google Health which will enable you to build online health profiles that belong to you, download medical records from doctors and pharmacies, get personalized health guidance and relevant news, find qualified doctors and connect to time-saving services and share selected information with family or caregiver.
Some people freaked when Google launched Gmail saying that it would mean Google would know almost everything about you once they could read your email. I hope these same people will post a few comments here with their opinions on Google Health.
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