PassingNotes.com

…has the whole world of startups turned into a vanity contest? a cradle for investors low in self esteem? for real, just when i though the vc’s couldn’t throw money at anything more stupid (200+ photo and video sharing sites funded last year? duh), along comes the ultimate insult to the collective intelligence of internet users everywhere, a site that aims to take us all back in time to the late 90’s, when about.com helped ‘do the thinkin’ for us’ and told us what mattered, a new ass-kissing machine that brought up half of my chicken tikka masala lunch within 30 seconds of use: welcome to mahalo

what’s mahalo? haven’t you heard about this? this dude jason calcanis, formerly from the team at netscape that sorta copied digg, well he joined a vc firm as an “AWMIR” (’affluent white man in residence’) trying to figure out what to do with his time and somebody else’s money and along comes a new “human powered search engine” led by 40 guides who have managed to focus on “what’s important to internet users” by visiting (gasp!) the search engines themselves…

what do you get at mahalo? uh, how about shit with large fonts? seriously, these “guides” if you will, for it’s a formidable task to unearth the biographies of all, they are much smarter than you - they know, for example, that people looking for information on iphones need a new site, a new way to quickly find links to apple.com, wikipedia.com, some competitors (pick a phone manufacturer, any manufacturer) and that these same people want it all on one page. fucking briliant. geniuses. how did i ever live without you? how do you do it over there at mahalo? who can figure out such devices?

…the real magic is how they figure out what’s important, and then waste time building shitty little one page summaries of this crap…why use it? because they have very, very carefully figured out within a seven day period of furious editing that apparently “internet users” really want to know about every A-list blogger who might conceivably write about or otherwise promote “mahalo goodness”

don’t believe me? here, check out this page for one of the main guides and mahalo’s editorial director who goes by the name “CK” on mahalo - now scroll down through his list of major edits between may 21st and may 29th (yes, last week)…notice anything unusual about that list? are those all things that you’ve searched for yourself? here’s a hint: go click through on each of those over-inflated pages describing each major blogger, then visit the blog and look for a positive note on mahalo…do you smell an incentive structure here? for example, arrington at techcrunch couldn’t help but write gushing words about the launch, and oddly he’s what everybody on the internet is looking for these days!

…sorry dudes, but as somebody who actually has to get real research done on the interwebs, i can only tell you that:

a) sequioa capital apparently does make some stupid fucking investments…(did i mention mahalo’s plans for actually separating people from money? exactly…)

a1)..as do elon musk and news corp (other investors) - what are you thinking elon? did you lose a bet or something?

b) nobody is gonna want this product, period. you are breaking a cardinal rule here: trying to create a solution (which sucks) and then trying to manufacture a problem through a poorly executed perception exercise (as in, “oh, thanks, i didn’t realize that google, yahoo, msn, wikipedia and those others didn’t work! thanks! really!)

c) the race to beat jimmy wales to the finish line with an alternative entrant in the “human powered search engine” was in fact over long ago, back when about.com got tired…nobody’s gonna want what wales is selling either, but yet, it’s your money…

d) something else, i forget (but it was important!)

hmmm, so yeah, my impression of this site is that even if they get past the amazing 10 thousand pages of information goal in 2007 (could you imagine that? over 10 thousand pages of information on the internet all just at one site? wow!), they will never be able to recruit a series of guides capable of delivering superior quality information aggregation in a uniform fashion (and it must be superior) who are also interested in doing the whole about.com thing all over again (or should i say dmoz.org?) to help some other white dudes make more money by creating a bullshit solution to a bullshit category in a one-size-fits-all craposphere of lookalike startups championed by the same golf players from the same zip code…

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