August 07, 2006
Today’s Tech Crunch posts made me think about a startup concept that’s been kicking around the net for awhile now. Through a VC friend of mine I heard about a sad tale about a company called Third Voice. This company’s software did something similar to what recent releases OthersOnline and Diigo are doing. The basic concept was to provide a message board and chat service that allowed people to leave comments about a given URL. I thought it was a pretty good idea. The Third Voice would provide a way for people to get reviews of products or services, discuss recent news and find out about crooked websites or poor service.
A buddy of mine and I heard about the concept (and it’s demise) and decided to take a whack at it. I was setting up the technical side of things when I started to look closely at the business model so I could develop the software requirements. I noticed more than a few problems with the concept when I was putting it through it’s paces designing the spec…
When I was doing research and looking around, I noticed that most site that the product would be useful on already had discussion, either in comments or a messageboard/forum. People usually discuss things like news, new products, music, etc. Well all of these things already have comment boxes. I love the idea of putting up a way for people to talk about a web 2.0 product or story…but that’s what techcrunch is for right? Amazon for books, various music sites for music… It just didn’t seem like there was a need that wasn’t being filled.
We thought about the use for doing reviews of a site or it’s product/service. But then we’d have to have a way to moderate it somehow to prevent people from slandering their business rivals or to give a business owner a chance to defend himself (granted most “forums” don’t do this, but it only seems fair if the product would be used mainly for reviews and hints). And then when looking at the list of sites I browse on a regular basis…not many need “reviews”. It just didn’t seem to be that useful…
I also took into consideration the resistance from website owners. In the wired article about the demise of Third Voice people referred to it as “digital graffiti”. And I would assume that a web site owner would prefer to have someone on his comment board, giving him more page views and community loyalty than to have some 3rd party app making a living off of his content. The more I thought about that, the less I liked it.
The final problem I saw was adoption. Installing an IE or firefox plugin is pretty easy. But really, how many people have the knowledge or inclination to do it? The thing about a forum is it takes a large volume of contributing users. You have to include everyone, even the people who render themselves technically incompetent. I tried all kinds of ideas…downloaded app, browser plugin, bookmarklet… just none of it seemed easy enough to set up to where you could get a large enough volume of people.
It’s possible that I over thought these issues or was a bit risk adverse. There are times when I wish we had just done it and thrown it out there (and I guess it’s not too late). I will be very interested to see how OthersOnline and Diigo do. I considered a social networking system like OthersOnline, but my problem is that surfing habits aren’t all that indicative of personality or traits. Look in your browser History right now and look at the last 20 sites you went to. Are these the things you want to be associated with? (if you’re reading this in the evening and you’ve got porn in your history, you know what I’m talking about). I think Diigo could be very valuable, but it has some of the “digital graffiti” aspect to it. The annotation feature was something I’d considered previously and I think it’s a great, great idea. I think this product could really go far, if they can get people to adopt it.
Even with all of it’s problems, I think the Third Voice concept has a lot of merit. In a more offline context, the idea of being able to leave little warnings or notes or interesting comments at various places in the real world is very intriguing and would be good to model online. For example wouldn’t it be great if you could access (useful) notes / tips / trivia / warnings when you were in a strange city (”Warning: Do not flirt with the redheaded bartender, she’s prone to violence”). That same concept would be wonderful on the web. I’m glad that there a few people playing on the edge of this space so I can see how it works out. And RIP to Third Voice.
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drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
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