The Next Web

Preople sells out on Ebay, as Wired clones the ‘net fame-o-meter’ idea.

Written on July 29, 2008 – 6:20 pm
David Petherick, Next Web WebTipr United Kingdom

I first came across Next Web co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten when I stumbled upon his quirky site ‘Preople‘ in early 2005. It had an irrestible and simple hook - you’d compare yourself with others (or compare any two people or things) to see who was more famous, and you could email the results to people, and invite them to challenge others.

Preople also had a odd and endearing community of bloggers grow up around it (including myself). It was fun, and very viral, but I don’t think anyone too it too seriously, and it was really not doing very much for the past few years after the initial novelty had worn off. So, being the pragmatic entrepreneur he is, Boris decided he’d offload the site by - what else - selling it on EBay, with a minimum bid of $999. And the news is - it’s sold! The winning bid was $1025! Boris was unavaible for direct comment today, but rumours have circulated on Twitter that he’d blown the proceeds on an extensive lunch in Amsterdam.

Great minds think alike…

Now it may be a coincidence, but I was amazed by the similarity of this tool available at Wired - entitled the ‘Wired Celebrity Meter’, and has some very familiar sounding ideas. Here’s how the service is described: —

Are You Internet Famous?
How It Works
The Celebrity Meter scans your URLs and scores internet fame based on:
* webpages linking to you
* your friends across social networks (just Twitter and MySpace for now)
* pages linking to your photos

Being of 2008 rather than 2005 vintage, The Wired Celebrity Meter is of course an embeddable widget. Try it out for yourself… but be warned - if I am only scoring a few hundred fame points behind Kevin Rose, then there’s something odd going on, or perhaps I need a new agent…

I hope you like that post!

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Boris, ebay, preople, sale, Wired

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Preople: when the deadpool shimmers, try eBay

Written on July 17, 2008 – 1:38 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

My co-editor Boris is not just a blogger, but a serial Internet entrepreneur. Starting a bunch of companies comes with success - like his first one, V3, and more recently, Twittercounter -, and failure. Today, we’ll discuss the latter.

One of Boris’ ideas didn’t really worked out. Preople (Pagerank for people) is a tool that checks your Internet fame - using a “complicated calculation”. In the early days of this product - March 2005 -, it received quite some press coverage and several web celebs - like Matt Mullenweg - calculated their score. Just like Twittercounter (Feedburner for Twitter), it concerns the human ego, which seems to be the key to success.

Well, turns out it isn’t: as Preople has become the home of spammers and bad php arguments. Preople needs some medical help from a geek, somebody who has the time and will to give the ego booster tool a second chance.

Boris isn’t gonna be that geek, as he’s busy with this blog. He decided to put his baby on eBay. Not for free though, as potential buyers can start bidding at $999,- (€630).

I’m not sure whether this auction will succeed. But hey, I’m here to inspire you. So here’s another way to get rid of a start-up that doesn’t tickle your fancy anymore.

Deadpool, ebay, google, preople

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