Social Media

I Love NameSake.com But, Probably Won’t Use it Much.

January 6, 2011 by Joe Hall · 8 Comments

The amazing Tony Adam sent me an invite to the private beta of NameSake.com last night, and I will admit, I was planning on being disappointed. Maybe it was my recent troubles with Quora that made me skeptical, but for some reason I wasn’t expecting much.

Boy was I wrong.

NameSake.com is a beautifully crafted social networking site that from the beginning has a warm almost cozy like community going on. Shortly after I got my account active, founder and product development lead, Brian Norgard, welcomed me to the community and even gave me some personalized tips on how to better communicate with other users. Instantly I met other users and engaged them in almost real time conversation.

The UI is probably one of the best aspects of this network, its clean and free of obstacles. As a result it creates a space that is both easy to use and a pleasure to engage in. In an industry that is hell bent on widgets, pokes, and other obnoxious features, NameSake.com is free of all that and strives to create a stress free space to engage, and for that I love it.

However, I do see one tiny problem with the service. I don’t have a reason to use it. Don’t get me wrong, I can see why many folks would use this everyday. But, for me I don’t see getting the same value from it that I do Twitter. And because I am becoming insanely more busy, its highly unlikely I am going to be able to appropriate more time away from things that provide real value.

My three wishes for NameSake.com:

A sizable amount of my clients start using it, so I can find value in using it too.
Other social media power houses take a page from NameSake.com’s play book and start building interfaces that are a joy to use.
All the good Karma that folks like Brian Norgard is spreading, pays off in the end.

When NameSake.com finally launches to the public, be sure to join and connect with me!

Filed Under: Social Media ·

Why Quora Is A Dead Man Walking

January 4, 2011 by Joe Hall · 7 Comments

Let me begin by saying that I have only used Quora briefly. Mostly because I don’t see the value. I understand the concept of crowd sourcing. But crowd sourcing only works if you have a large diverse crowd to draw from. That’s the underlying premise, pull the best answers from a large diverse group of opinions and ideas. Compared to other question and answer sites, Quora isn’t large or diverse.

I have only posted one question and that will probably be my last. Here’s why: Earlier today I posted: “Is Quora an appropriate place to ask silly questions for comedic value?” I then posted it to Twitter and one of my twitter followers responded. Then a few minutes later I get a status message that says someone has redirected my question to “Is Quora only for ‘serious’ questions?” At first I was thinking, Well that’s cool they are trying to help by pointing out an already existing thread.

But then I realized that no, they are actually 301ing my original question thread! Meaning that if you go to my original question you will now be redirected to another user’s question instead.

So here we have a site that completely thrives off of user submitted content and they think its OK to highjack that content whenever they want.

I know what many of you are thinking, But, Joe, its the same question. They are trying to help. I don’t care if its the same question. Its not the question that I even care about, its the answers. Just because someone else has posted the same question, doesn’t mean we are going to have the same dialog as well.

So why do I think this means the end of Quora? Because, users don’t like to have their conversations high jacked, and Quora killing their own content mill.

Can you imagine a moderator at Twitter redirecting similar tweets from different users, completely derailing their user’s dialog? I was looking forward to continuing my dialog with my twitter follower that posted a question, but that conversation was cut short (or off rather).

If you ask any web entrepreneur what’s the biggest value in question and answer sites they will tell you, content generation. These types of sites churn out very high quality content that works very well in search engines. But, if your content is riddled with 301′s and redirects then you can kiss that value goodbye. I know what you are thinking, what about duplicate content? aren’t they doing the right thing cutting down on duplicate content? This isn’t duplicate content, because it would take nothing less than a miracle for similar questions to create identical answers and dialog!

Which is where the real value is to begin with! In the dialog! Which in my case no longer exist.