Amazing how Mahalo Share works screencast by ShawnSmith (shawnsmith's blog):



Thanks a lot Shawn!

Today on Mahalo Daily we learn a bunch of YoYo tricks... very cool stuff.

Vote for it on digg! (and don't be bashful sending me your diggs!).

You know you're on to something really big when the SEO's polluting the web make you public enemy #1... IN A T-SHIRT!!!

Note: I'll be wearing this to my next fireside chat with Danny Sullivan for sure!

{saving time by hartichocked via CC }

I get these great emails and IMs from Web 2.0 folks all the time. As I've said before some services are designed for the top .001% of the market and some are designed for the "the market." That's one of the things I learned a lot about while at Graduate school (also known as my 12 months @ AOL LLC). There is a very large market out there for internet services and that market is filled with folks who want simple, easy to use services that they trust.

Mahalo was designed for those folks. If you love submitted stories to digg, load TechMeme 12x day, and have over ten Facebook applications installed you're probably not the target market for these simple services--and that's totally cool! Some folks are cutting edge, few folks are bleeding edge, and most folks are just getting on with their life.

Anyway, here's today's IM that made me really smile:

• Hey, thought you might like a quick perspective I heard yesterday. Talking to a local friend of mine (40-50) who takes a lot of holidays and was complaining about how hard it is to find good travel on Google (hotels, destinations etc SEOd to death).
  
  I showed him Mahalo and he was blown away... he was wondering if he could pay money for it or something. He was amazed something so useful was free to use. He was really happy to save, literally, hours of painful Google research for his next few trips.
  
  so you know you're doing something right when the typical 'man on the street' is excited for Mahalo and adds it to his bookmarks.
  

Couple of important points in this anecdote:

1. Human's curating search can save other humans a LOT of time.
2. Certain verticals benefit more from human curation: travel, products, news, and health come to mind.
3. When people love a service they bookmark it. That's the Holy Grail of product design, getting someone to bookmark your service.
4. People do pay for the service Mahalo provides for free currently: they pay for it with THEIR time. They pay for by asking their loved ones or employees to do research. We save folks a LOT of time and money, and if you create a service that does that you're going to have an impact.

Anyway, I love these stories... so, if you want to conduct a little experiment forget about the hype around human search, SEO, and my public persona--that's all meaningless. Sit one of your friends or family members down and show them one of our search results next to Google, Yahoo, or Ask and watch the magic happen.

If I had not have done tons of market research in this fashion (including with out in-house testing lab) I would not have even started Mahalo (let alone raised capital to go after this market). At this point in my career I put my faith not in what A-List bloggers and pundits think, I put my faith in my I see in user labs. Pundits don't know jack about the market, the MARKET knows about the market (and you can include me in that pundit list... if you consider me a pundit).

Hope everyone is having a great weekend... I'm suffering with a throbbing jaw and mouth sores. Pass the vicodin.



{ vicodin by prodigal via CC }

As everyone knows Mahalo isn't just a search engine/service, it's also a platform. A platform we're hoping that developers can leverage to make money... in other words, a "win-win-win." ;-)

As in users get new interesting products developed on our platform by independent developer. We are working with dozens of developers right now, and they are really brainstorming about how we can all make cool products--and a living--together.

Ray has a great demo of Mahalo's OPML structure on his blog today.

Special guests: Andy Beard, Michael Grey, Brian Provost, and Allen Stern.

Hello everyone, Tyler here -- back again with another exciting episode for your viewing and listening pleasure.

In this episode, Jason gets feedback on Mahalo from four formidable figures in the SEO industry; an industry that Mahalo aims to make irrelevant. Is reasoned debate possible in a roundtable with such polarized participants? Watch or listen to CalacanisCast 29 Beta to find out.

*Joining the Cast crew is Conrad Quilty-Harper, who you may recognize from his quality work at engadget.com


download: audio [mp3] video [mp4] iPod [mp4]
subscribe: iTunes | audio
view: transcripts
contact: cast [at] calacanis.com

Show Notes
0:21 - London: NMK Forum, Mike Butcher, Mahalo Greenhouse
5:06 - First Impressions of Mahalo: human search vs. SEO, the shaka and warning symbols
13:12 - Dodge Viper
27:34 - Domains by proxy
32:57 - Squidoo and SEO
54:12 - Lets make a bet
60:01 - Wikipedia's relationship with Mahalo

The great thing about mixing it up with the SEO crowd is that they prove your point over and over and over again... first they tried to kidnap my search result on Google, now they are buying adwords to attack Mahalo (do a search for Mahalo.com on Google and you'll see ads like the one below).

The more SEOs fight you the more you know you're doing the right thing for the average web user. SEO is going to be looked at as a footnote in the history of the internet and search--a time we'll want to forget.

For more childish SEO behavoir check here.

We have an interesting discussion starting over at Facebook:

What would you do next if you were CEO of Mahalo?

Feel free to post here, but would rather see the debate over there.

I think this is the first video interview I've done for Mahalo.com.... comments over at Loic's blog.

I'm getting obsessed with optimization of Mahalo. We have a bunch of servers, squid, memecache, image servers, and a great team lead by Mark Jeffrey (who i've known for 10+ years).

Right now we are trying to get our very beautiful pages--designed by Jon Hicks, the greatest web designer on the planet for my money--to load in under one second.

If you know about optimization please give us some feedback and thoughts here in the comments. I have a great firefox plugin called FireBug that lets you see load times. Seems like I get 1.5 seconds for our serps, then .7 to 1.2 for second loads of serps (when stuff is semicached).

what load times are people seeing out there?

should we strip the pages down and make them less purdy and more fasty!??!

please let me know!

here is a firebug image showing 1.22 seconds. feedback (click on image look at bottom right)?

Kevin Rose dugg us!! http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Mahalo_We_re_here_to_help
Today my team launched our latest project Mahalo.com. It's a human-powered search engine. We've already completed the top 4,000 search terms on the Internet and we hope to do 10,000 by the end of the year.

Our Mission: To help people.... a lot.

Please take a look at our results and compare the ones we have side by side with machine powered search by folks like Google, Ask, Yahoo, Technorati, AOL, and MSN. I think you'll find that humans can really help make search results better.

Feedback is not only welcome, I'm begging you for it! That's the whole point of our ALPAH: Tell us how to make search suck less! We're listening and we want to help... in fact, our tag line is "We're here to help!" The comments below are open so have at it, or post your thought to your own blog and I'll link to your comments (keep them constructive of course).

Here's the press release for today's launch, which took place at the Wall Street Journal's D Conference (thank Kara and Walt for including me in such an amazing event!). It also has details of our funding including our lead investors Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, and Newscorp.

You'll probably be able to find some more feedback on the Mahalo project at these links over the next two days:

Google Blog Search
Technorati Blog Search
TechMeme
Google News
and at http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo_press_coverage

If you're with the media, a blogger, or podcaster and would like to schedule an interview please feel free to email media at mahalo dot com.

Searching for Mahalo photos on Google Images on Flickr... lots of cool stuff.