Jason Calacanis Responds

The preface here will be lengthy, but I will also respond to Jason’s response. If you can’t wait, scroll down about 9 paragraphs!

I recently took a break from obsessing on NCAA March Madness and Jericho Ratings to write a post about Mahalo’s foray into social networking and the “semantic web”. I posted it here, and although I hadn’t written on this blog in 5 months and I didn’t look at the web stats, I’m pretty sure Jason Calacanis who runs Mahalo was probably the only person to actually *read* the post, and he responded to it as well.

I’ve known Jason for over 10 years, back in the days when he was running the Silicon Alley Reporter in NYC. I admire Jason quite a bit, for the same reasons I admire one of his mentors, Ted Leonsis and for the same reason I admire someone likes of Tony Hung even though I’ve never met him: they are all tireless and their energy never seems to wane.

Ted is among the super rich, while Jason is merely rich enough where he’d probably never have to work another day in his life if he didn’t feel like it. But these guys LOVE what they do. There is no question, loving what you do is about the best thing you can have happen to you. I’ve been fortunate enough to have that experience at least once or twice for more than a fair bit of time. But I never had the energy, or more accurately the proper psychology to maintain the energy.

The Internet has many useful aspects, but one utility I’m sure I never prognosticated about in 1994 was that it can serve as a tool to shame you. Through connections I made years ago, I see the likes of Jason and Ted and Mark Cuban and Fred Wilson and Kara Swisher and now the new breed like Michael Arrington, Om Malik, and Tony Hung. To a man (or woman) they are all tireless, and they all LOVE what they do.

I ask myself if I was a person who was running a startup and some guy whose writing I used to like 10 years ago posted a column on his blog that nobody reads -- would I respond? Even if it was a fairly well thought out post? My answer: probably not. And I ask myself WHY NOT? Why not?

Many times when it comes to the likes of Jason and Ted I’ve asked ‘Why o’ why are you not lazier than I!?’” I know the answer though. And here’s where it gets a little tricky. I love taking stuff apart. I’m a classic dismantler. I can dismantle, Mahalo, or why I think GigaOm’s business model is lousy as hell, but I’m not just hypercritical of everything and anything outside of myself. I’m hypercritical of myself too! I’m not sure whether I have completely dismantled myself or whether I actually did it so thoroughly that I was unable to put myself quite back together.

The reason the likes of Ted and Jason and Cubes and Fred Wilson and Swish all have boundless energy where I don’t is pretty simple really: they all love what they do. And what they really do, what they really, really love doing more than anything is this: competing.

I have not shared their love of the competition, and the truth is, I need to.

Jason responded as follows:

Well, when you see the actuall pages I think you'll see that it's not a bad use of time for us. couple of points:

a) this isn't a huge investment on our part. We've got a solid base of users and allowing them to share their opinions on a search result page is fairly easy, while providing a great experience.

b) you're correct that opinions are personalized per user. You might give your brother advice to watch The Wire and your friend advice to watch Battlestar. However, those individuals also know you and your tastes and can digest what you mean when you review each.

c) we're in the third inning of web search/research and navigation. we believe that combining humans and the social graph with machines is the best model.

d) we don't have to own this social information--we're going to import/sync much of it from other places like NetFlix and GoodReads and Facebook.

anyway, thanks for the feedback... it will give me much to consider over the weekend.

all the best,

Jason

Jason, I agree with everything you wrote. I’m sure it’s not a big investment, and I’m sure it’s very early in the game and that Mahalo needs not own any of the social information and can get it elsewhere. But I’m fairly resolute in this: doing any of that stuff isn’t really very important to or for Mahalo right now. I could be wrong, but as I remember it, like AOL, Google went with the KFC model initially. They only focused on doing one thing right. For AOL it was creating graphical client software that made getting online (and later, on the Internet) easier than what anyone else had going at the time. Google focused on having the best search and didn’t expand into other areas until they were already fairly well recognized as the best search on the Internet.

Since the use case for Mahalo seems to be exactly the same people who are influenced by Taco Bell, Burger King and McDonalds commercials (which is an extremely big market based on the ad spend) trying to tie Mahalo into social networking and the semantic web seems like a complete waste of time.

I wrote the lengthy preface above because I see (a lot of) people take personal pot shots at you frequently. And while not even you have any question that you bring at least some of it on yourself (you are a “bring it on!” kind of guy), and while all of the tactics you use in promoting aren’t always for me personally, the only way you actually rub me the wrong way is by reminding me that I’m a dope for not being more competitive. I can’t hold that against you, and I don’t. Probably the thing I like about you the most is that with almost everything you’re just completely OK with having the conversation right out in the open. I hope that never changes.

I think the best thing you could do for Mahalo is focus almost exclusively on the best search results possible, at the end of the day that’s all that’s going to matter. If you get that right, you’ll figure out all the rest. If you don’t get that right, no matter what else you do and how well you do it, it won’t matter. Keep doing Mahalo Daily please, though. :-)

Dumb and Dumber: Mahalo loving the Semantic Web and Social Graph

I haven’t written here in a while, but today’s topic will be one I’ve written about before: Mahalo. I want Mahalo to succeed, and I wouldn’t be heartbroken at all about Calacanis someday owning the NY Knicks. That the Dolans are so rich that they just don’t care how badly they run the team – it makes a good case for atheism. I’d rather believe there is a higher calling and a higher purpose.

I also believe that “what’s really going on” is important, and this week, Jason and Mahalo announced a bunch of stuff that was mostly, but not completely, a bunch of crap.

On his blog, Calacanis describes My Mahalo as “…something that builds semantic relationships between our users and our database (fancy way of saying you and the thing you own, have seen, want to see, want to read, etc.). These features take the social graph (fancy way of saying your friends) and integrates it into search results.”

This isn’t complete bullshit, but it’s a large dose of almost complete bullshit. The social graph thing doesn’t work like that, and can’t be automated like that without putting an onerous amount of work on both the person creating the information and the person absorbing the information. Things that require onerous amounts of work – they don’t do very well.

Here’s what I mean. I love a bunch of TV shows, and I can list them all for you, rank my favorites in order, etc. But this isn’t a particularly good or useful filter for my friends and family. For example, I know my brother Steve pretty well. I can say things to him like:

Get the House DVDs, you’ll like them
Get the Boston Legal DVDs, you’ll like them
Get The Wire DVDs, you’ll love them

I can also hedge with shows on the bubble and say something like, “I really LOVED Dexter, but I’m not sure you would love it or not.”

I can do all of this easily because I've known my brother all my life and know his tastes pretty well. Up to this point, it is fairly possible to automate it. But that’s only one view of the picture. Other shows I like a lot are: Stargate: SG1, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica, LOST and Supernatural.

My brother would not like any of those shows.

So how useful is a generic list of shows I love to any one individual? It’s not very useful at all, and there's no easy way to make it more useful! It's certainly possible to make it more useful -- sure, I could do a lot of work to tag the information in such a way that “if you like this, you’ll like this, but if you don’t like this, you won’t like that” but that also requires the person using the information to do something similar. How likely is that? It's not likely at all really.

I have at least 15 years of experience with putting some of the profiling work on both the producer of the content and the consumer of the content and I’m here to tell you, at least based on the current state of technology or anything that will be doable in the next 10 years…it’s not happening. The work involved to make the information useful isn’t a ton of work, but it’s more work than is going to be done, especially by Mahalo's target market (basically your mom and dad and everyone else who never heard of TechCrunch, Twitter or the semantic web) and there’s just no getting around that.

I wonder how happy Mike Moritz and the gang at Sequoia is with Jason focusing and burning cash on this stuff. It generates a lot of buzz, but every dollar spent on buzz is a dollar not spent on expanding great search results for Mahalo sooner. The recession is coming too, and honestly, I believe that will wind up being good for Mahalo.

The core use case for Mahalo is not comprised of twittering, semantic web loving Facebook addicts. There is a use case for Mahalo that is huge, but that’s dependent on good search results for whatever you’re searching on. Spending money on semantic relationships and the social graph? That sure seems like a complete waste of money. Economic recession will be good for Mahalo – it will bring focus. Promotion is important. Buzz is important too. But a better search experience than Google provides for the core use case…way more important!

I know I’m on record as being a Mahalo Daily lover (and I am!), but this fits in very well with the target market for Mahalo and the promotional aspects are a bonus. Semantic web? Social graph? They’re 180 degrees from Mahalo’s target user and beyond buzz with the digerati make no sense at all for Mahalo’s target market.

Jason Calacanis: One Step Closer to Owning the New York Knicks

I’d kind of like to see it. I remember the glory days of Earl Monroe, Clyde Frazier, Dave Debusschere, Willis Reed, etc. The Dolans have run the franchise for far too long now. New blood!

I was going to go with the headline of: “Facebook to buy Mahalo for TEN BILLION DOLLARS?”, but I didn’t want to get the Dolans too excited. People will be all over Robert Scoble for this (watch the videos, they’re worth watching), especially the Web 2.0 dweebs who don’t understand that most of the world doesn’t think the same way as they do.

Scoble predicts in four years time, Techmeme, Mahalo, and Facebook are going to cause problems for Google.

Though I’m sure it won’t have any impact on Google’s stock price tomorrow and I’m not as convinced Google can’t compete well with what he’s talking about, Scoble is on to something. And hats off to Scoble, as I’d have placed him as one of those Web 2.0 dweebs.

I don’t yet buy as Scoble does that it’s just not in Google’s DNA to do something like Mahalo (and Techmeme and Facebook) itself or just buy them, but I loved where in part 3 he riffed on Yahoo for a bit as being the potential wildcard in all of this. “Watch out for Yahoo!” (about the only thing that would’ve made that any better for me is if he had said, this means YOU Kara Swisher!).

I’m still agnostic on Mahalo, but I like the premise of it a lot and want to see what happens when they have 25K human edited pages. Jason’s play here is the 80-20 rule. He doesn’t plan for Mahalo to be as all encompassing as Google, instead going for the 20% of the searches that probably represent 80% of the search market. Though why Mahalo already has pages on bacon and kielbasa and not TV Ratings is…interesting.

But c’mon, don’t you want to see Calacanis high fiving with Spike Lee during the NBA finals?

Scoble’s plan that you would only find out about the videos via social networking and not Google went south in about 10 minutes (very good natured of Scoble to post the link via twitter himself). If anything Google has gotten better and faster over the last 6 months.

Note to Scoble: More white boarding videos, less blogging. You’re a natural!

Mahalo Ombudsman for a Night

Or at least for a few minutes at 2:10am. Jason posted: Mahalo Ombudsman? Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening Tim Faulkner over at Valleywag posted this: Mahalo: Calacanis an iPhone expert, say his underlings. While there are actually some useful links on the page, I think it's fair to complain that there's not a single link to Apple's own site.

I'm agnostic on Mahalo. I don't know if it can succeed but I also am not sure it's doomed to fail. It seems like Mahalo has a while to figure it out and I'm open to seeing how it evolves. I'm not at all agnostic about the Ombudsman concept though and when I went to look at the Mahalo page on iPhone problems (which I never would have seen if not for Valleywag), it raised some questions for the Ombudsman in me.

First of all, I agree with Faulkner, the link to Jason's own twitter-esque posting about Jason's frustration with the lack of cut & paste on the iPhone should not be on a site intended to provide "useful information". But that wasn't what raised the biggest question for me.

When I saw that the page had been authored by Conrad Quilty-Harper who writes for Engadget, with links to stuff Conrad himself had written on Engadget it set off all kinds of flashing red lights about bias (which Jason's Ombudsman post was about).

I confess to being an Engadget junky (hey, I read Valleywag religiously, it's not like I have any shame), but the thing is, aside from a stray self-destructive tendency here and there, I don't believe in the notion of "negative asymmetrical risk". That's just a fancy way of saying I don't believe in things with very little upside and huge downside. The downside here, is that people will question, and rightfully so in this case, Mahalo's bias. Certainly this sort of thing will be mocked on Valleywag, but it would be a legitimate question/concern by anyone who raised it.

My advice: don't use Conrad for technology pieces or at the very least, don't let him link to his own pieces because even if they are the best ones, people will wonder about...bias. It's not worth it. Also, because of Jason's history, Mahalo needs a company stance about linking back to stuff in the Weblogs Inc. empire or risk a lot of flack.

I don't remotely take the hard line stance Faulkner does -- he believes Mahalo is doomed to fail, but Mahalo needs to eradicate any legitimate concerns around bias or Mahalo will be doomed to failure.

While I do not have all the solutions regarding how to handle the perception of "he's linking to his buddies' sites" (c'mon, it's 2:15 a.m.), it's a solvable problem -- and one Mahalo has the time to solve. But they better do it before the Mahalo Beta, whenever that is.

Update: 08/16/07 11:40PDT: Jason e-mailed to say that linking to your own work is against the Mahalo guidelines, but the whole thing was his bad because Conrad (who is an intern) hadn't received the guide training yet. Jason also indicated (and CC'd his QA team) that stuff should never link to his own site unless it was absolutely necessary, requested the link be removed and reassigned the page to someone else...and took the blame for the whole thing. Pretty mensch-y if you ask me.

Dave Winer vs. Jason Calacanis: Who ya Got?

Disclosure: I have met Jason, he recently bought me brunch and maybe as much as 10 years ago he ranked me in the Silicon Alley Reporter as one of the 100 most influential new media people in NY. All of his antics are not my cup of tea, but generally speaking I find him to be very engaging as well as entertaining. I did join the Facebook group “People who can’t help but love Jason Calacanis!”

I have never met Dave Winer, but since I already "pushed" in one "who ya got?" today, I got Dave Winer. RSS baby. Way more important than a free brunch, or being ranked as influential – and even more important than interesting and engaging conversation. I love, love RSS. I might even change my middle name so that my initials can be RSS. Really Simple Syndication is good, good stuff.

I probably agree with Dave that Jason is hypocritical for whining about spam and then shamelessly self promoting constantly. But one of my favorite quotes is Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. I’m not immune from that myself, neither is Jason, and neither probably is Dave “if I can’t profit from it why should I care?” Winer.

I understand the thinking, and I’m all for self-interest, but that seems over the top. Dave doesn’t care about Mahalo because he can’t develop for it, and that’s fine, but other than that they utilize RSS, the New York Times web site isn’t an “open platform”, but it’s still something that millions of people love to use.

Bottom line on Mahalo is if it can become very useful – more useful than other generic search then people will use it and not give a rat’s behind whether it’s a platform or not.

Still, I have to pick Dave even if he complains about the iPhone for the same reason he complains about Calacanis’ Mahalo. The iPhone isn’t a platform so Dave can’t figure out how to develop something that will make money on it. Oh freaking well. I say that because no “platform” came out of the blue to give us an iPhone. Could Apple have made the iPhone more of an open platform? I’m not really so sure.

I’m OK if Jason and his investors are the only ones who will make money off Mahalo if the service it provides is useful to the people who use it. As for the iPhone, it might be more useful if it were an open platform, but I am finding the first generation of the phone very, very useful, even with its flaws. If the mobile phone industry here in the USA itself was an open platform, I’d probably be more prone to siding with Dave. That the mobile phones here aren’t built around some open platform that allows you to switch your phone to another carrier, etc., is a big deal to me. That Dave can’t make money off the iPhone or Mahalo is not. But it was fun to think about for 10 minutes.

There’s lots of stuff I use every day that’s not a platform. It doesn’t matter if it’s technology or not. Comcast or Starbucks. I still give them my money. Am I supposed to boycott Comcast because Dave Winer and Fred Wilson haven’t figured out how to develop an application for Comcast they can make money off of?

The ironic thing to me here is this: the non-platform iPhone + i.bloglines.com (Bloglines feed reader for the iPhone) is the best RSS feed reading mechanism EVER (so far). I am able to absorb much, much more information more quickly than I ever have before. Hell, it’s SO easy and so fast, I want to get everything via RSS, even my freaking e-mail.

Still, I’m a massive hypocrite myself here, because when the Flash upgrade for the iPhone is released, if it blocks streaming in the same way that Sony’s PSP did, I will send Dave some flowers and ask him how I can assist in the quest to turn the iPhone into a platform. But hands down, it’s already the best portable media device I’ve ever used, plus the best feed reader I've ever used. That's pretty good for a generation 1 product.

I personally don’t care whether Mahalo is a platform or not and I’m sure I’ll never change my mind about that. As for the iPhone, I’ll let you know after the update that supports Flash finally comes out (I’m guessing in October).

Dave Winer’s contributions to the Internet are many, and significant though and not just RSS. It’s just that RSS significantly changed the way I access information. So even though I think “if I can’t make money off it, I just don’t care” seems a bit over-the-top to me, I got Dave Winer.

P.S. the conference where the Jason vs. Dave smack talk occured, Gnomedex was not a "software developers" conference, if it was, Dave's comments would've been completely reasonable. Since it wasn't, his comments seemed over-the-top to me.

P.P.S. Jason's English Bulldog, Toro is an amazing chick magnet -- if Jason let me borrow him for a few hours the next time he is in SF, I might swing over to Jason's side in this contest...

Jason Calacanis on Losing Weight

Jason, who's also launching the "human search" startup Mahalo posted a very thoughtful and inspirational 5 step plan for weight loss. I think step #3 is the only one that really matters (change your mindset!) and of course, that's the hardest one! Everything else flows and gets easier from there. While lifting weights (step #5) was not a part of my plan, I completely agree that lower your % body fat (as you convert fat into muscle) the better your metabolism is.


Here's a picture of Jason, and Daniel Burka & Kevin Rose from Digg. I had brunch with Jason a couple of weeks back and though Valleywag would have led me to believe that a death match between Jason and Kevin would've broken out, when they ran into each other on Union Street, it was downright cordial. I regret I couldn't get Jason's English bulldog, Toro to stare at the camera, judging from the reaction of the women we encountered on the street, Toro was clearly the most handsome of the bunch.

(click to enlarge)