Ready To Launch - There and Back again.
October 17, 2008 – 2:57 pmIt has been a long and perilous road to get to this junction.
The original spark came when discussing with a friend the merits of Delicious social bookmarking service. As power users of Delicious, we were generally pleased with the service - particular the part that caught our eye was what happened when you searched on Delicious. We found that search results among Delicious bookmarks would generally outperform Google whenever that topic was within a niche that was popular among delicious users (macs, linux, video games, time wasters, best of lists)
We took that basic idea and expanded as the search results was not the core focus of Delicious and they were also position to really the hi-tech crowd only. (only text - not much exploration)
The first thought we had was what would happen is we took this basic model and reached out to the common internet user. What would happen if we provided a multimedia rich site where browsers could not only grab their favorite links on the internet, but to arrange them into relevant content bundles.
The idea further expanded as we looked at the general search experience of the common internet user.
The idea was that currently searching is in its infancy. Google has become a verb and does a fine job of first line organization of information. However, how smart a computer may be it is still a computer.
We asked the question, what would happen if for every single search query, there was a human behind the machine, looking at the search results and organizing them to display the best of the best.
We then did a little research and saw that this had already been tried on paid method by Mahalo and Cha-Cha who in different ways were paying professional editors to search the Net and bring the users back objective search results on their topic of query.
Then we looked at the infancy of Wikia - which seems to be a great idea in itself, however is again moving towards the objective model that must be bred through consensus.
Studying further, we found all of their models slightly flawed (for our purposes) for the following reasons.
PROBLEM #1
- Relying on Paid editors does not scale
- The internet and information is constantly evolving, to have to pay someone $$ to create a search result is fine in itself, however when that search result changes, you will have to pay them again and then again.
- There is too much information on the net to rely on paid models. Even if we had 20 million in Venture Capital to hire an army of Bundle Bots, by the time we finished with that money, many of the results would be outdated in themselves.
YouBundles Solution:
- Everyperson is an expert on something. We decided to provide a toolkit for internet users at large to go and be able to create their own bundles
- We are operating on the 90/9/1 principle. Meaning that
- %90 of our site visitors will just search and browse.
- %9 will contribute. (ie.. comment, rate or tinker)
- %1 will actively create Bundles.
- This %1 is dynamic and ever changing meaning that we have set up a self-sustainable and self-perpetuating system is which our user base will scale with itself and constantly create fresh content to feed its own consumption.
- We are operating on the 90/9/1 principle. Meaning that
PROBLEM #2
- Relying on Paid editors or editorial consensus brings a conservative and ‘objective’ view to a subject.
- This being ok in itself, however Google already tries to provide the conservative and objective view.
- We know that all people are different and have different opinions/ We wanted people to express their personal view on a subject.
- By doing this, we are not trying to compete with the Objective overlord of Google, but rather being a place where people can explore and share their niche passions.
YouBundles Solution
- By allowing people at large to create bundles, we are going to get 10 different views on the same subject by 10 different people. This is Great as for every opinion, there will be others that share this same opinion and find the information useful.
- We then provide a toolset for the community at large to rate these bundles. Meaning that the userbase at large determines what they prefer and this determines what gets the most exposure.
And Then…
So studying all of these different models we found a great unanswered need on the internet. The need to give humans a chance to create their own search results. To do this effectively is a trick shot as evidenced by the various other players in the market.
However when correctly implemented it will call upon the more basic and primal of human instincts. That is the desire to share useful information with others. Please take a moment to watch this 1 minute video below as it quickly sums up the reach of our vision.
We hope that you share in this vision and thank you all for your continued and future support.
