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.
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January 7th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
thanks for the link love! interesting points.
January 7th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I agree with Ash on this issue.
Whilst I can’t comment on the efficacy of the Wikia platform, I agree that they should spend more time creating and improving their platform than publicly espousing how potent it “will” become.
Google tackled the search problem silently. By the time, their search engine came into the awareness of the mainsteam, the platform was pretty robust already. The company that will surpass their efforts needs to rely less on hype but on silently and iteratively improving on a radically different approach to solving the still open problem that is Personalised Search.
Generally speaking, in the past two years, there have been a lot of firms that have ventured into the tech space without a tangible business model, and have not solved a real problem. Many are allured by the seemingly stratospheric and overnight fortunes that becloud the Valley, and have jumped into the latest fad without ensuring that there is a pressing need for their product. The “build quickly and flip” mentality that fanned the flames of the subprime mess seems to have corroded the tech space. Nobody really wants to solve a problem anymore. It’s increasingly about hyping up a product and flipping it.
TechCrunch can argue that they are not too blame for the mess. After all, their audience seem to like the topics on which they choose to write. If that’s the case, the inmates have definitely taken over the asylum.
January 7th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Tech Crunch is just a microcosm of what is wrong with matters, not the cause. So I certainly don’t want to blame Tech Crunch, but it is more of a TMZ-style tech rag (Valleywag, essentially) than a CNET… hence the irony that some of CNET’s woes are blamed on competition from the likes of Tech Crunch which is nonsense.
But you are right about Google, no one knew anything about them until it was too late. Today, we brag about transparency but what exactly are we being transparent about?
Smoke and mirrors is anything but transparent.