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Hey Pete: What happened to Noodly?

Just a quick curiosity post for Pete Cashmore at Mashable: what ever happened to Noodly? It quietly ceased to exist, and the domain just redirects to Mashable now. What was it? Why did you wrap it up? Just curious to hear the story!

cashmore, mashable, noodly startups

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BlinkX, Video Search, and the Corporate Shell Game

The Financial Times broke the news, but Mashable summed it up more succinctly: $20 and a free pony if you can figure this one out.

The demerger of the consumer business is a complex transaction, in which Autonomy will first take ownership of Blinkx, a separate company founded by Autonomy’s former US chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake, which already uses Autonomy’s consumer search technology. In exchange Blinkx will be given exclusive rights to the technology, everywhere outside China. Then the Blinkx business will be demerged again and floated. [From the FT article]

Sounds like an complicated way for Suranga Chandratillake to take a pay day while keeping shareholders happy. Or something.

Meanwhile, try using Blinkx. Personally, I found the search results from YouTube alone a lot better: less clutter in the results, more relevance.

BlinkX for “Nissan Skyline.”
YouTube for “Nissan Skyline.”

BlinkX results are full of a bunch of remote-controlled car stuff - not what I was looking for. Plus, the BlinkX interface, with preview videos playing unsolicited, video thumbnails, and so on, is distracting to the point of making the site painful to use - however technically impressive it may be. Say what you will about the aesthetics/usability of YouTube, but its better than BlinkX.

Finally, BlinkX doesn’t seem to be indexing YouTube properly either. The result sets from each don’t match, and I have no idea how BlinkX ranks video results from one site over another anyway. When it comes right down to it, BlinkX seems counter-intuitive, dis-organized, and a confusing way to find video. This is the fate I fear for CastTV.

blinkx, casttv, mashable, mergers, video youtube

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What is the real story with Alexaholic/Statsaholic/Amazon?

The Alexa vs. Statsaholic story, in response to which I proposed a boycott of the Amazon eCommerce API, is getting complicated. Pete Cashmore has a petition on Mashable, calling on Amazon and Statsaholic to settle the dispute without litigation.

It emerged in comments however (see comments by James), that statsaholic was not using the Alexa API (which charges fees), but was instead scraping, or otherwise circumventing the API. James points readers to the Alexa Blog post on the topic in which Alexa takes issue with:

1. Trademark infringement via the “Alexa”holic name. Though Alexaholic has changed its name, Alexa points out that Statsaholic still redirects the Alexaholic domain to the new site - a remedy that is not satisfactory to Alexa. Personally, I think Alexa forfeited their rights to demand restitution from Statsaholic by allowing the use of the Alexaholic domain for years, and explicitly stating that they were aware of the Alexaholic, and supportive of it. Alexa should be content with the Statsaholic switch and call it a lesson learned on trademark protection.
2. Alexa also takes issue with Statsaholic’s use of graphs. The Alexa fee-based API (AWIS)does not include graphs - so statsaholic apparently (more-or-less) hotlinks them. This issue has the ring of legitimacy to it. The charts and the system to produce them consume resources, and the IP behind the charting system has value. If Statsaholic used paid AWIS data and their own charting engine, their wouldn’t be a problem. But it seems that Statsaholic is doing neither.

IN summary: (a) Statsaholic is entited to the Statsaholic name, and traffic from Alexaholic. (b) If Statsaholic is a viable business, it can afford to put out for its own chart rendering engine, and pay for use of AWIS data. To be honest, that sound preferable anyway - there’s a lot more opportunity to add value to data when you’re completely in control of presentation; and, that would give Statsaholic the opportunity to blend with data from other sources, creating a superior metric.

In any event, I don’t think Alexa needed to resort to litigation to get this ball rolling, but I don’t know both sides of the story. Pete C. suggests in response to James in comments that Alexa tried to up-charge Statsaholic, asking for more than the standard AWIS fees - is this substantiated?

alexa, alexaholic, amazon, awis, mashable statsaholic

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Boooo to Amazon - Suing Statsaholic: Amazon API/ECS Boycott time?

EDIT: HOW ABOUT MONDAY, APRIL 23rd FOR AN API ECS BOYCOTT? Post your thoughts in the comments. By “boycott” I mean if you use ECS to link to Amazon for affiliate sales, shut ‘er down and hit amazon in the wallet.

As a frequent user of the Amazon ECS API and follower of Amazon’s forays into platform-territory (S3, etc), I find it very disappointing to read about Amazon suing Statsaholic [Alexaholic] [via Mashable].

Mashable has the actual filing in their post, but the nub of it is that Statsaholic took Amazon’s open data and application platform and added value to it by offering an expanded feature set around Amazon’s offering, much like I did with the Flickr API and Google Maps on BlockRocker.com [flickr portion since removed], and much like many mashup artists have done thousands of times all over the net. I identified a gap in Flickr’s product offering and filled it, using their API. Flickr benefited, and so did I. When Flickr released their own geotagging product, I let the photo portion of BlockRocker die a slow death, eventually shuttered it, and that was that.

The same thing should have happened with Amazon and Statsaholic. Why Amazon feels the need to sue a niche business out of existence rather than thanking them for the adoption they’ve driven to this point and clobbering them with a superior product is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the Amazon Mashup community should unite in solidarity against bullying of API-partners by having an Amazon shutdown day: I imagine if everyone using the Amazon API shuttered it for a day in protest, Amazon would feel some impact. I’ll Amazon links on UpcomingDiscs.com and HDDB.net - anyone else? What’s a good date?

alexa, alexaholic, amazon, blockrocker, boycott, flickr, mashable statsaholic

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How to Make Cluztr the Next Big Thing in Four Easy Steps

Yesterday, Mashable pointed me to Cluztr - a new “social” browsing site that, through a browser add-on, tracks your and surfaces your clickstream. Cluztr incorporates elements of Digg, Del.icio.us, and MyBlogLog into what is effectively an in-the-cloud, social browser history. Cluztr uses this social history to introduce you to others in style of MyBlogLog.

Business Model & Privacy

The first thought I had was that whatever business model Cluztr has must revolve around selling the clickstream data they collect. Which it does:

We may provide aggregate statistics about our customers, sales, browser type, operating system, Internet, domain, demographic and profile data, traffic patterns, and related site information to reputable third parties, but these statistics will not include personally identifying information. [Privacy Statement]

Cluztr’s privacy policy also describes a retrograde-sounding “opt-out” spamming policy, whereby Cluztr will use your clickstream data to target you for advertising until you email them to opt-out:

We may use personal data to let you know about products and services that may be of particular interest to you. We may also want to provide you with related information from third parties that we think may be of interest to you. If you would rather not receive this information, please send an e-mail to: info@cluztr.com. [Privacy Statement]

Hmmmmm. So, Cluztr is in fact a market research house and advertising engine of the sort that regularly raises such hue-and-cry, when - for instance - someone finds out the DoubleClick uses cookies to track your clickstream across the internet.

And that’s OK - you’re trading your clickstream data for the value proposition of online history and social browsing, and by downloading and installing the Cluztr add in, you’re explicitly accepting this (compared to DoubleClick’s cookie tracking that took place unknown to most). Additionally, Cluztr does promise to aggregate/anonymize data, offers the (cumbersome) opt-out option, and allows you to identify sites in your history as “private” - though apparently you cannot set your entire clickstream to private.

Spam and Gaming

Cluztr has a great feature that creates a Digg-like popularity list of what sites are “hot” at any given moment. Unfortunately, this list is game-able. See the blurred out ones above? Those are pr0n sites - “sex latin chick gets ——” is not the sort of internet gold that I want to stumble across.

How to Make Cluztr the Next Big Thing

Cluztr has a great peice of infrastructure, and a social/viral model to potentially take it big. A few tweaks to the business model and site functionality could make it a very useful tool - and drive adoption.

1. Get a new name: “Cluztr” is awkward and goofy sounding. I’m sorry, but it is. The equation worked for Flickr as novelty propelled awareness, but that easy brand-equity has gone away. Additionally, Cluztr doesn’t really speak to what the site does, it looks awkward, and its more difficult to describe the spelling of than Flickr.
2. Ditch the Vocabulary: This is an addendum to the first point. Cluztr refers to popular sites as “cluztrs” - presumably because users are “clustering” around them. Jeff Nolan summed up the folly of creating your own lexicon when I called out Teqlo for using “Teqlets” instead of widgets:
   

   Every startup wants to develop their own vocabulary and at some point they realize what a stupid idea that is. We figured that out about 2 months ago…

3. Flip your Advertising to Opt-In: Credibility will drive adoption, and going the opt-in route as opposed to the current negative-enrollment (you’re signed up unless you do something) model will drive credibility. This isn’t Columbia House (the king of negative enrollment sales) - this is the brave new fronteir. Kick it up knotch.
4. Automated Categorization & Filtering: Yeah, its going to be a bitch to do, but it needs doing. GMail, Google Reader, and Porn shouldn’t be in the top “cluztrs,” or listed anywhere on the site for that matter. Neither should fully parameterized domains with people’s user id strings and hashed authentication tokens. This could be done with machine intelligence if Cluztr took the time to build the database that would feed it, or could be done with community filtering via a “flagging” system.

Summary

Though this profile may sound pessimistic, I do think the idea has legs. With a filtering system and a few tweaks, Cluztr has the potential to bring together the best of del.icio.us, Digg, and MyBlogLog in a simple to use fashion with a viral model that drives membership - real value can be delivered to Cluztr users, and Cluztr advertising/research clients alike. That’s compelling.

browsing, cluztr, delicious, digg, mashable, mybloglog social

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