okay, so here’s some free investigative insight from yours truly regarding thenamesdatabase, a social networking site that has evolved from a pimple on the arse of the internet to a networking site of brobdingnagian proportions in under 24 months….never heard of it? okay, let me tell you a quick story…i got an email from my friend shally the other week inviting me to join (it came from inside the site)…i clicked on through (shally generally sends only good stuff ;)….

…but before i could access this database of over 17 million people, i was required to give up 4 new friends’ email addresses - damn! it chilled my shit…was this some kind of digital subterfuge? a marketeer playing on the trust-based networks of active friendships and contacts to create the world’s largest email harvesting machine? i tried putting in fake emails, but it caught me, then i tried putting in my own other emails, and it caught me again…ouch…being the naturally curious guy i am, i took it upon myself to track down one of the elusive founders myself - and i spent some time talking to him by phone, and in the end i walked away considerably more comfortable - this site appears to be for real, designed for users, not a grandiose marketing ruse…

…now i promised this guy that i would not share his email or his home or mobile numbers (which i now have), so let’s just call him ‘dan’…about 2 years ago, dan and a friend came up with this idea for a networking site, a low-on-graphics, low-on-profile-data version of something between friendster and classmates…the ‘big idea‘: most users around the globe simply can not display the graphics and trick-laden navigation features of these us-centric networking sites (think linkedin) and most users could give two shits about the ridiculous feature sets available from sites like myspace (as in, too much to do, so nothing gets done)..their idea: just connect people, with a name, a valid email, some key areas of interest (e.g. military alum) and key notes regarding where they went to school and where they’re from - note: this site collects ip addresses and pinpoints locations (validity depends on where you are when you register)…

..but here’s what’s really fascinating: within 2 years, this site - operated by only 2 guys working part time - has climbed to over 17 million registered members, signs up over 40 thousand new folks each day, and is on its way to blowing past friendster by early ‘06, and possibly myspace by late ‘06…but unlike those two latter firms - which employ over 400 professionals combined, and spend millions upon millions in promotional dollars and technology infrastructure - these two guys (dan and ‘mister x’) are doing this part time (both are engineers) and after boning up on sna, they figured out how to launch the entire thing for literally $67 dollars (read that again yahoo, linkedin, friendster and others, i said sixty-seven-dollars)…add some free software, an old dell pc and some blood, sweat and tears and voila (!), the whole first version was taken from concept to code and implementation in under 48 hours…

so how do they make money? dan says that the site will never accept advertising - people simply pay 50 cents to email any single person, or pay 12 dollars per year for unlimited email permissions (emails are cloaked, they route through the system)…why 12 bucks, or 50 cents? dan says it was part of a profit-optimization model the two built..currently, over 30 million emails are sent through the system each month (you do the math, assume ‘most’ are paying 12 per year)…these dudes are getting rich, quickly and quietly…and did i mentioned that total hardware investments to date are under 10 thousand dollars?

…oh, and a few other interesting factoids about thenamesdatabase: unlike most networking sites, users are generally older, many into their 40’s; only 40 percent of users are from the us, 40 percent are from ‘around the pac rim’ and to be more specific, about 40 percent are from around the indian ocean rim (new zealand and south africa represent huge user groups)…according to dan, people ‘on the street’ in new zealand all know the site’s name - just like people around boston have heard of friendster or linkedin…based on traffic usage data compared to that coming from alexis, thenamesdatabase.com is around the 1400th busiest site on the internet (the site does not list itself, so don’t bother, this info is from dan)…the look and feel of the site will remain subfusc, this makes it easier for international users to come on board through dialup, internet cafes (older browsers) and other means (even mobile devices)…and don’t look for any crazy new features because this is a utilitarian site, one that the big boys could really learn from…kudos to these dudes for getting it rolling, snowballing users and scaling for less than the cost of a nina simone box set…

…but wait, what about the privacy issues? why not sell it? well, dan does admit that they’d sell for the right money (it would have to be a lotta money btw)…but they still respect privacy, period. don’t worry about it. when i looked at it, what i saw was the opportunity to do two-mode analysis on the networks and sell the marketing data to huge corporations (e.g. i’ve got location data, network connection layer data, in turn, the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing platform…like bzzzagent on steroids for less money)…can you say cha-ching? these guys can…

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