Well, what I’ve learned recently is that you simply can’t get any kind of great idea up and running without spending your hard-earned cash.
Way back in late 2002 and early 2003 I had an idea for a website that allowed academics and research students to put their CVs online. They’d be of interest to other students or academics and journalists. I bought the address “ExpertMatchMaker.com” and looked for someone to help me put the idea up. I even upgraded my old PC to run XP and downloaded a bittorrented version of Dreamweaver.
But, nothing doing. Who was to know that a few years later LinkedIn and Facebook would be, you know, *huge*.
Maybe 18 months ago I was pestering everyone I knew with more than 5 mins of experience to help me work on my latest idea. What I’d noticed is that what is missing from blogs and sites is the ability to know objectively how well thought of a particular writer is. You can always spend a little time reading a site, its comments, and its general feel and you can get an idea, but I thought it would be great to be able to just glance at a logo or number and get an indication of what you’re in for.
Furthermore, you could use the mechanism you’d need to understand reputation and influence to track who’s reading someone, and rate the influence of their readers and therefore the writer’s influence as well.
I’d planned to call it “Audience” or “Hubbub”.
But there was no interest from anyone for ages, until Miramar Mike got onboard and we started hunting out people.
What we soon learned is that trying to motivate people without fronting cash is damn near impossible. The idea was good, but no developer in town would stick at it
And then the inevitable happened, and the idea has been addressed by none other than Google. And it’s pretty much exactly what I’ve been trying to get people to listen to…
Goes to show.
Pretty fucking frustrating really.
3 October, 2008 at 7:08 am
Try starting a TV show.
It’s just as frustrating except that what gets made instead of yours is something really crap
3 October, 2008 at 9:57 am
Well having read that piece about Google it seems to me that they’re simply refining the monetisation of search on facebook. Rather like gilding a dog turd.
It is also unclear whether your google calculated influence-rank would be publicly available, or kept secret by google simply to enable them to sell more targeted advertising. If it was publicly available, I suspect it would become meaningless using the criteria cited in the article as it would appear to be open to gaming by ‘friend-whores’ and people deliberately boosting their posting frequency. In the same way that people on flickr try to game the algorithm used to determine a photo’s ‘interestingness’ and get it high up in the site’s ‘Explore’ rankings.
A slightly different concept used be available on flickr via some bloke coding something called your ‘flickr score’ using flickr’s API, but the guy who wrote it seems to have taken it down.
Your idea seems somewhat broader than the facebook/myspace walled gardens. It also seems that Tim Berners-Lee is also interested in ranking the reliability of what someone has written on the web.
I think just because Google’s having a crack at it for advertising purposes doesn’t nullify your efforts to build something broader. But getting the cash is still the tricky part.
3 October, 2008 at 11:28 am
yeah, the problem was in getting to proof of concept. we just couldn’t keep everyone in the same room long enough to get a concrete something coded.
3 October, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Ideas are cheap. Execution is expensive. Such is life, I’m afraid.