Kara Interviews Jason Calacanis
Here is the second video of my visit to Mahalo (the human-powered search engine start-up)–an interview with its founder Jason Calacanis.
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Comments
For the life of me I still don’t see how Mahalo will scale. Yahoo!’s original directory started off with a team of Surfers (editors) who created and organized and ontology. Yahoo! ended up decommissioning the directory because it didn’t scale. Yahoo! was overwhelmed by the number of submissions.
Fast forward to what eventually became Open Directory Project (aka DMOZ) which eventually amassed over 70,000 editors. The current DMOZ is rife with SPAM, dead links, neglect, and accusations of graft.
Other things such as Social Bookmarking (i.e. Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc) have shown problems as well due to the lack of depth.
Mahalo, to me, is more like Answers.com than a competitor to Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft’s search engines.
The bottom line is the Internet, growing at an exponential rate, just can’t scale with linear approaches to organize the information. One must employ algorithmic techniques that can scale with the growth of information on the web and understand concepts from a fundamental relationship level.
Posted by Stanley Wong at July 17th, 2007 at 1:34 pmWhich is why Jason’s struggle is so poignant!
Seriously, I forgot to compare it to Yahoo, where I once spent days with those “surfers,” who are now lost to Web history.
But I can say I once saw the equivalent of Internet unicorns.
Thanks for the great analysis.
Posted by Kara Swisher at July 17th, 2007 at 1:44 pm