Web X.0

Quigo named #1 by AlwaysOn Media

Quigo was just named the #1 private digital media company in the US by AlwaysOn Media. We'll be receiving the award later this month at the AO Media Summit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in NYC.

I posted about this in more detail over at Quigo's blog. Cool!

Lessons from Findory

Greg Linden is putting Findory to sleep:

Development on Findory now will slow to a crawl. There may be new features, but they will be rare. I no longer will spend time exploring funding, biz dev deals, or recruiting.

Findory and outbrain share the same goal - to help people find content that's potentially most interesting to each one of them (as opposed to most-popular items as in Digg, etc). Findory was based on the same collaborative filtering concepts behind Amazon's personalized recommendations, which was also authored by Greg.

So what went wrong?

Why did the algorithms that worked so spectacularly well for Amazon's personalization didn't take off for Findory's personalization? I think this happened for one core reason:

• In shopping: personalization = helping me find that one item that I'm likely to buy and love. Or in other words, personalization via recommendations.
• In content: personalization = help me save time by sorting through the piles of news so that I can skip through the bad stuff and spend time only on the good stuff. Or - personalization via filtering.

I bet many people (me included) would love to sit around and consume content on Findory (or Digg, etc), but just don't have the time to do so...  Findory required me to spend more of my scarce attention to use it. What I need is a service that has 'net positive attention emissions'... A service that saves me time rather than consumes more of it. We're not there yet, but that's exactly what we're trying to do at outbrain.

Greg is one of our favorite bloggers at outbrain, and I hope that the fading of Findory doesn't also mean the fading of Greg's blogging.

More coverage on GigaOm, TechCrunch, Don Dodge and Read/Write Web.

StubHub acquired by eBay - you heard it here first...

About 7 months ago I predicted that eBay would eventually buy StubHub, the wonderful ticket marketplace. Well - looks like the day has come and eBay has acquired StubHub for $310M. From TechCrunch:

"...they are announcing the deal earlier than expected - they are acquiring San Francisco-based StubHub for $285 million plus the cash on StubHub’s books, which is about $25 million. The deal has been signed and should close in 30 days or so. eBay will be releasing a press release shortly."

This one really had the writing on the wall... it just made too much sense, after eBay lost this important marketplace to StubHub. And as I said in my original post - in the marketplace business there is rarely place for more than 1 player and eBay cannot afford not to be the one...

A bunch of other predictions I threw on the wall are here.

More coverage on GigaOm.