Luyi Chen’s blog

I have just checked the new version of Mayi. I found it has an interesting feature that helps new user to make friends. It shows you updates from 100 temporary friends and a big score if you can make them as your real friends within a period.

It’s a problem of any social network that you will need to have a sizable friend list to feel interesting. To develop your friend list is the number one task you will need to do after entering a new social network. The way to offer it as a game like task is better than to just show you some head shots of certain pretty dude.

Another related problem is that how you would accept friend request you will probably received from these sites. Most of them you don’t actually know. Don’t be fooled by the number of common friends you have. Your friends don’t know them either.

You can either accept them all, which will result in a big friends list that you really know little of them. Or you can strictly research them one by one if they are really the one you want, but that is time consuming. You go to social network to relax, not to receive a burden.

I used to take the former way to accept them all. In this way, you won’t have much burden to deal with those requests. And it’s good to have a bigger influence in social network, which has become another kind of media, aka social media.

But I have realized that there’s third way to deal with them. And it’s better than the former two ways in my mind at this moment. I will just accept those I really know, but leave others untouched. I don’t ignore them. In case, I get to know them in the future, I don’t need to request back. If I have too much time in my hand, I will speak with some of them, since they opt-in to become my friend.

That sounds interesting? Sure, it sounds interesting.

Today when I was doing ego search, I found our conference on this Chinese social event website, 8sheng. It looks like a young service, with only 2 month, based on Ruby on Rails. Since I don’t have any other good Chinese social calendar in mind, maybe this is the one to give a try. I think it’s a good idea to make the events page a dig style. When they have a large user base, this feature will be useful to filter out interesting events. They have a blog called Going On.

There’s a new mobile sns company in Shanhai called Belinker. The idea is to link people with geographic information via SMS. Here’s how it works: You send your location to the service via SMS. Then your friends will be informed by the service about your location. Probably only friends near the same location should be informed. But this is based on if they have reported their location to the service beforehand. I don’t know if this works, since many people actually doesn’t want to be traced.

Today I got an invitation to Ma.gnolia. It looks like an online bookmark with rich social network support. After reading the about page, it seems it’s another supporter of people powered search.

It has bookmarklet. So you can save links directly into your Ma.gnolia account. There’s also a greasemonkey script to add links from del.icio.us.

It’s difficult to test a link service when you don’t have many links in your account. What if link services can synchronize with each other. Then they can fight based on feature not link and user base.

This morning, I knew Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us. Since I am both MyWeb and Del.icio.us user, I am looking forward to how Del.icio.us will integrate with MyWeb.

Yahoo search blog said:

Finally, don’t be surprised if you see My Web and del.icio.us borrow a few ideas from each other in the future.

Joshua answered in the mail list:

[They will be] Separate. Obviously there will be some cross-pollination.

So let’s wait and see. Currently 50% of my links go into del.icio.us, and 50% go into MyWeb. Why I use two services in the same time? Let’s have a comparison:

• Del.icio.us has good social feature. Links are easy to share. With the latest integration with firefox, it’s user friendly. And lots of early adopters make an exerllent user background. So what locks me in is not the system, but the users.
• MyWeb has good search feature. With Yahoo’s resources, its service is more reliable. And it saves copy of the web page. (IMO, del.icio.us can never get such kind of resources if it keeps independent.) But it’s not very easy to share links with non-Yahoo users. There’s no way to use it as a public link blog.

So with these pros and cons of the two services, I have to split my links into two places. Here is how I use the two services: Dynamic and index pages go into del.icio.us. Static articles, especially expiring news stories go into MyWeb.

How much value does people powered search provide?

I would like to take personalization as an example. Findory and TailRank are two of my favorite personalized search engine. As to the big difference between them, TailRank is people powered, while Findory is not. TailRank goes a clever way to take both number of sharing and inbound links into account to determine how important a story is.

Currently, I cannot tell which service is better for me. I just use them both. In my experience, people powered does make sense, but not very big sense. We still have to wait at least several months to be benefit from this acquisition.

And don’t forget there are other players in the playground. As this Red Hering article pointed out:

Many so-called “web 2.0” companies, including Wink and Jookster, are also exploring improving search by compiling users’ recommendations. Blog search engine Technorati makes heavy use of tags to help connect users to what they’re looking for. Digg uses user input to point to interesting technology news and web sites in real time.

Update: Greg Yardley pointed out what actually Yahoo bought:

It’s the del.icio.us community that can’t be duplicated. Yahoo didn’t buy del.icio.us’ technology; it bought our bookmarks and tags - and for quite a price. Assume 300,000 people make use of del.icio.us in a meaningful, regular way (a wild-ass guess, but for the sake of argument) and assume the purchase price is around $30 million. That means my personal bookmarks just got sold for a hundred bucks. Which is considerably more [should be less] than I thought they were worth.

Thanks to Arnet for mentioning this on del.icio.us list.

Update: David Beisel talked about monetization of bookmark services. He said, “With the Yahoo Delicious acquisition, there is one less acquirer out there available to shop for a competitive service. This situation leaves the remainder of the field ‘validated’ by the acquisition, but challenged to truly build a business model around their offering.” see The Search for Delicious Bookmarking Revenue