DISQUS

Pete:

I read about PeepAgg and am looking forward to the public beta. But I fundamentally do not believe that such platforms can work. Was anyone able to convert the-many-open-source-auction-platforms into an eBay? Ning is another example (though the jury is still out on that and I feel Ning had a better chance). In social networking the value is not in the platform but in the community and "what" that community desires. I do not believe you can do a lowest-common-denominator social platform and expect it work appeal to different communities. LinkedIn is different than MySpace which is different then Cyworld - all social networks in their own way and very successful ones. Thats just my opinion :) Time will tell what really works.

Pete: Good post and an interesting play but I do not see so much *newsness* here at all. Shopping.com already has cashback including a few other sites.

Its unbelievable and exciting to see a lot of plays targeted an addressing some real physical world issues. Swapping is generating a lot of different players - almost all in the last 6-12 months - and each with a slight different angle.

I love the space but do not agree that a pure barter model can be exciting for users for too long. Barter and swapping is based on the fundamental assumption that users will share what they *do not* want anymore and that builds an inventory of things that may not be most appealing to the broader potential user base. The second big point is the absence of real world currency - adding currency, I feel, can make a big difference.

Pete:

I totally agree. MySpace really played a huge role in the growth of photobucket, youtube, slide and others. However the questions remains of how this growth can be monetized - or may be "if" this growth can be monetized at all. Or will it just turn into a bandwidth guzzler for these services and they will have to hunt for revenue somewhere else. Only time will tell.

On the other hand, I am not surprised that flickr is 6th because there is still a very large number of people I know in other parts of the US, in UK and India who have not heard of it. However, I think the community that flickr has going for itself is a rich one - one that will and is paying for pro accounts and that is tangible revenue, apart from advertising.

It will be interetsing to rank these sites based on revenues, profits and costs. :)

Interesting. I haven't seen it as yet but I think if they can make it feel open and feel more like it belongs to the users than to themselves, it may work. A lot also depends on how people are creating their portals. I'll look forward to checking it out when they launch.

Pete, I think this is a good idea but essentially a wrapper on CJ/Linkshare that makes it much simpler for any user to benefit from affiliate programs (which really is the best form of performance marketing and will survive for a long time). However, the barrier to entry is minimal and distrubution may be difficult. How about creating TypePad widgets for adding blocks of affiliate links per your blog/focus? Also I think Chitika kind of automates all of this including the review content part. But on a much broader perspective, I think any systems makes it so simple to broadcast affiliate links, the perceived value to their end users diminishes and it can turn spammy. A very good indication of this is the fact that every affiliate site is not even 1/100th as successful as the top 1% super affiliate sites. So MyPickList and others may commodatize participation and benefits from affiliate programs but they might, implicity, focus on helping people make money from affiliate programs rather than solving some very specific end user pain points. Don't get me wrong - the idea is good but it may be tough to control how people use it.

Pete, I think this is a good idea but essentially a wrapper on CJ/Linkshare that makes it much simpler for any user to benefit from affiliate programs (which really is the best form of performance marketing and will survive for a long time). However, the barrier to entry is minimal and distrubution may be difficult. How about creating TypePad widgets for adding blocks of affiliate links per your blog/focus? Also I think Chitika kind of automates all of this including the review content part.

But on a much broader perspective, I think any systems makes it so simple to broadcast affiliate links, the perceived value to their end users diminishes and it can turn spammy. A very good indication of this is the fact that every affiliate site is not even 1/100th as successful as the top 1% super affiliate sites.

So MyPickList and others may commodatize participation and benefits from affiliate programs but they might, implicity, focus on helping people make money from affiliate programs rather than solving some very specific end user pain points. Don't get me wrong - the idea is good but it may be tough to control how people use it.

haha. Good one, Pete. Please make sure Email Harvester collects emails for several months before it launches its beta for customers to do the bug testing :)

I think it is going to be a challenge to create new silo-ed sites where consumers can come and write reviews. It is not impossible, but might not be scalable. However, all review content is good content and usually helpful, than harmful in anyway. So good luck to InsiderPages with the new money :)

aah...I had similar thoughts when I looked at them last night. Even if, say, I create a Wikia wiki for say, India, how do I get traffic and build a community around it. I think its fairly tough and the beneifts of a few successfull sites within the Wikia community cannot benefit all. Think of this as all the free forum platforms like phpBB - no?

Pete:

This is an interesting post. I have myself wanted to take some time to look at MySpace carefully but haven't gotten to that.

Lawrence's comment is right on. Considering that MySpace is continuing to grow there is so much untapped potential. These are all early adopters.

Think of all the tools/services/etc. that might appeal to a MySpace users to look cool - music, tshirts, clocks, graphics, videos, pictures and so on. Can Cafepress service be private labeled and offered to MySpace users? I think there can be a lot of possibilities but one may have to consider what providers true value to the MySpace generation...and their perceived value may different from the non-MySpacers.

Pete: This is a cool thing to use (especially since we have a distributed team it can really help us) but monetization might be tricky.

Pete: This is definitely a new breed of mobile-edge-content generator sites and this one sounds very similar to Flagr.com. There definitely seems to be a potential opportunity here thought its not clear how a useful service can be created by posting pictures on a social network via your cell phone. Flagr has a certain focus and I like the fact that they are ensuring their data stays clean by enforcing a structure - though at the same time its tough to think that a larger userbase can follow guidelines to post. It has not happened as yet.

The key might really be to build structure around this and apply it to specific pain areas. The challenge will be in ensuring good meta data - the context - to define, organize and search across the pictures.

This was definitely on the cards, Pete but I didn't expect it so soon. I am wondering who is really going to loose market share with this - my guess is AOL might be hit the most followed by Yahoo and MSN. The UI doesn't looks like they a call functionality - is that a good news for the multitude of IM-call apps?

Hi Pete:

I have been trying cocomment since yesterday and it really is cool. My team had developed a clunky version for us to track word of mouth of iNods using what we call a wom|meter, but cocomment is way cool.

Having said that the barrier to entry really is low. For example: today their site was down or something and the cocomment box of my comments on my blog disappeared ( I didnt see one on your site either). A few more of these and the users will flee to the next service that comes along.

Also I think if they start putting ads next to my comment content aggregated on their site, I think I will definitely object to that. Thier value is not so high for them to use my content to drive ad revenues - dont you think so? Also I really feel this goes against the central theme of giving the control of user-generated content to the users.

I totally agree with you. I tested it on Mike's blog yesterday and the chat room had nothing interetsing to read/chat/ask/agree about for the 10 mins I stayed around. Whats worse is that half of the time I saw messages with people asking "Is here?" and so on.

I don't see how this can work. But then, I have been wrong more than once. So I am a non-believer too, but will keep a watch on how they do.

"wtf" :)

But you are right, this can actually take off in unknown ways with the teen population globally.

Another interesting thing might be to watch your office/home remotely while you are away. I can see this to be a simple solution that might be easy to use. How about my friend using this to watch his 6-month old baby upstairs while he's busy cooking dinner downstairs - in addition to the monitor that he uses. It might be a cool application which is simple and easy to use.

About them having a PR guy does sound strange, especially when the target market may be the younger crowd mainly.

Pete: This is a really well written post. Its simple and explains the power of the edge very elegantly. Having met a lot of people recently to discuss inods, I encountered a segment of non-believers who do not buy the fact that the edge will eventually prevail. Though time will prove it, I believe there is definite need for a strong push for an 'Edge Empowered' movement. Its a simple value proposition for the users who stand to benefit the most.

We don't know if its inods that will prevail in reveiws search, or edgeio in classifieds, but we hope iNods, edgeio, kritx and others really provide the momentum to drive towards an edge publishing model which empowers the users and facilitates a consumer- or business-process in a much better way.

Mathew:

My company iNods is in a similar edge content aggregation and search space. Edge content aggregation can really delivery a lot of value but there will be a lot of challenges in terms of consolidation and discovery of that edge content. Infact this is the real challenge for more edge aggregation plays.

The idea of asking users to tag their classifieds with "listing" tag is good but its not trivial to achieve on a large scale. Secondly, if the whole idea depends on this then its tough to make it work. There is biggg chicken and egg problem here. Now assume that people start tagging their classfieds with "listing" tag - in this case it will be trivial for blog search engines to roll our a similar service in a fraction of the the time and with a much wider coverage.

In almost all edge plays, I believe it is critical to have a stronger barrier to entry and/or some other community angle that makes it unique. We do have a similar challenge at iNods (we think we are solving the edge content discovery problem is a more defensible way) and you will see how we are addressing it with a range of our upcoming features.

Robert, it will be awesome if the bloggers add the disclaimer clearly. However, I don't believe this is happening and if there is a way to ensure this. It really depends on the ethics of the blogger as Rebecca has pointed out.

I just posted about this on my blog: http://www.webvapors.com/

Robert: Thanks for a quick and good coverage of E27. A well written description of the companies. Its awesome to see so many young entreprenuers trying out things early on - there is just so one much learns from the first stratup, whethere it becomes successful or not. E27 is really good event - brings out the reason why United States (more like Silicon Valley) remains the innovation capital of the world.

One thing I noticed though was the business models still seem weak for several of these companies. Box.net has no barrier to entry and little marketing differentiation from the likes of StrongSpace. Same with BillMonk - sometimes you really don't want yet another web application to do yet another task that's may not be worth as much management time. Placesite and 411 Metro will need advertising sales team to target niches/local markets, which is not an easy task and its tough to get the scale of Adsense without the muscle of Google.

Nevertheless, theoretically, one can rip apart any idea. That means nothing - the founders can still make it work :) All the best to all of them!

TAD:

You will see that iNods currently covers areas beyond shopping as well including travel, lifestyle etc. We may not be as strong in it as yet. But stay tuned as we expand and make it more evident by changing the text above the search box :)

Also, I am completely in agreement with you with regards to structure. iNods will support structures BUT WILL NEVER require a review content writer to structure the content in any particular way. For example the game review "Game Review: Heroscape 2" post on your site will be seamlessly indexed by iNods and displayed for relevant search queries.

We will however "encourage" writers to simply submit their site/blog to us directly and will have a ping functionality setup soon along with a set of "suggested" guidelines to follow like you have said about optional tags.

Pete, you are right. There is a ton of valuable content, including review content on the blogs today and it will just continue to get better in value and better in structure.

Brian, if you check a few searches on iNods you will see that a very small percentage of results are from centralized sites like epinions.com and others. A large number of valueable content is coming from niche review sites that are tracking lcd monitors or ipods or other products/services. Most of these are affiliate sites and they ensuring their content is valuable to keep visitors coming back and fueling affiliate revenues.

Blogs will be really another kind of affiliate sites and we, at iNods, want to encourage that.

Also, centralized sites may not all shutdown ... they will have their own value proposition.

The egde content aggregation model may not apply to all segments but it is really a strong one for reviews and advice content.