BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
07 Jan 2008

Last year, Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales’ got on a soapbox during the otherwise quiet Holiday season and told everyone that search was broken and that he would be launching a Google killer.

His fanboys got excited, many people called him crazy… I admitted that I did not really get what Wales was trying to do, adding that a for-profit transparent search engine was a contradiction.  Having built a search engine myself, I added that search is futile without distribution, and since Wikipedia added that to Wikia, then Wales stood a chance… had he not made himself a target with the Google killer-line.

Today Wikia launches in alpha (Can we drop the Beta, let alone Alpha please).  Marketing Pilgrim points to a quote in NYT:

“We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google killer.”

Gee, where would people get that idea?

In between then and now, Mahalo basically borrowed some of Wikia’s mojo by running with the Wiki idea, and PowerSet too rode the Google-killing motif… only to downplay that rhetoric when times got hard.

This weekend, I (like many others) got the invite from Jimbo, who asked us not to blog about it.  I played with it and thought it was ironic that the default search was in fact Google results (maybe he’s hoping the weight of Wikia search queries will kill Google’s servers?)

Anyway, I did not write about it because it was a non-company launching a non-product around a non-concept.  But, I knew many would, and ultimately, many did.

I won’t comment much on Wikia, I gave it 3 queries before realizing that it was no match for our own MetaMojo.com, let alone Google, Yahoo!, MSN or Ask.com… but I do think it speaks volumes about the world [wide web] we live in.

HYPE, FLASH AND BUZZ
Welcome to the world of hype, flash and buzz. Once upon a time, ever the greatest of companies were built over time. Yes, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo! et al. all seemed like overnight successes thanks to a dot com bubble fueled by venture capital money and public shareholder thirst for web startups… but the truth is most of these companies really took almost a decade to become the monsters they are today.

Then, during the Internet bust, a lot of companies that hit paydirt this time around grew off the radar.

That has all changed. Actually, the process to build successful companies has not. Yes, we get odd standouts like Twitter who launch to great fanfare and retain some of their buzz (though they too face challenges in actually building a business), but by and large, we now live in a world of hype, flash and buzz and it’s really, really not healthy.

Michael Arrington’s success seems overnight, but he too had a rather lengthy path before attaining, fame, power and success. But his Tech Crunch blog is now representative with everything that is wrong with the state of the web economy. Companies no longer seem to strive to become successful over time, the goal is to get a mention or two on Tech Crunch, assuming it is the sure fire passe-partout to web glory…  I recall when a Federated Media-backed daily video blog launched starring some cute girl.  It got so much press in the blogosphere but I doubt the show is even up and running, let alone thriving… but Tech Crunch and the usual suspects wrote about it as if we had the second coming of David Letterman or SNL on our hands.  This is wrong!

“With great power comes great responsibility…”

It’s pretty ironic and odd, fitting perhaps, that Wikia might very well be born and killed on Tech Crunch (for the record, I think Wikipedia’s awesome traffic will make Wikia a player in 1, 3 or 5 years even if it’s a lame product).  But we no longer seem to have any sense of time anymore.

The biggest dichotomy in this way of thinking is that we seem to be hellbent on transparency when sometimes, we need to keep our freaking mouths shut!  We launched a major partnership today with a major site.  I’d love to rave and rant about it, but it’s not the right thing to do.  We will disclose it soon… but it does not make sense to.

This morning, we closed a major content deal, too.  Trust me, that is arguably a game-changing deal for WatchMojo.com, but talking about it alone is somewhat futile now.  For one thing, it gives us a major comparative advantage.  Secondly, we have to execute on the deal and make it happen.  In other words, it seems ironic that we seem to think blogs will usher the death of press releases but more than ever, we’re operating in a press release mentality.

It’s a shame.  The hype machine needs to stop.  But, by the time you read this, we’re boosting the latest non-story.

Let it be.