Web X.0

Looking for the best product person in NYC

We're looking for a great product person to head product management over at outbrain. The timing for joining us couldn't be any better - We have a huge and growing distribution network, we've recently closed a $5M A-round with top-tier VC's, and we have a great little team in which each person has a huge impact.

I'm looking for someone for our NY office who can be hands-on in spec'ing a web product and can work with our engineers in Israel to create the best blog ratings & recommendations service out there. In the long term, I'd like this person to be able to hire and manage our PM team. The title would be Director or VP of PM. Any experience with online advertising products is more than welcome.

If you're a *great* product person at any of the following companies, the timing now is PERFECT to switch over to a well-funded startup with lots of upside... (note: the folks that joined us at a similar stage at my previous company - Quigo - did fairly well... ;-)

• Are you at Google watching the value of your stock dropping ~40% in the past few months?
• Are you (or - were you...) with DoubleClick pissed at how Google is treating you?
• Are you at Microsoft fed up with all the committees you need to get through to launch every small feature? 
• Are you at Yahoo? (enough said... ;-)

If you're at any of these companies, now is the time to jump ship. Drop me a note to: galai [at] outbrain [dot] com

New outbrain functionality released

We've finished a major product release earlier today, mostly around the website. Bloggers can now register with us (registration is optional), or claim their blog to get access to reporting, etc. We'll be covering some of the new features released in our company blog over the next few days.

CenterNetworks and Mashable have coverage of this release.

New languages supported in outbrain

We've just launched the outbrain rating widget in 14 new languages (bringing us to a total of 20 supported languages). All translated and verified by the community of bloggers. Cool!

If you have a blog in any of the following languages, head to our 'get widgets' page and install it:

• Arabic
• Catalan
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Dutch
• English
• Farsi / Persian
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Italian
• Malayalam
• Polish 
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Spanish
• Turkish
• Ukranian

(note: You may have noticed a slightly strange image at the top of this post... It's from a cool new service called PicApp that allows bloggers to post high-quality, copyrighted stock images for free (full disclosure: I'm an advisor to the company). If you have any feedback on that image - please submit it in the comments. Thanks!)

outbrain announcements today

We just released a bunch of new stuff over at outbrain today:

• Rating widget is now available for bloggers free of charge. I posted about this here.
• Rating scores are now personalized for users that have a rating history. See screenshot below. I posted about the personalization here.

We're also running a support forum on Satisfaction. So if you have any questions - check us out here.

Implicit Social Networks

{Image CC by jared Thanks!}

Rogel rants about social networks here and here. We (=outbrain) are often categorized as being a social network focused on sharing of blog content. I had this question come up on several occasions, especially with VC's, and I get annoyed every time. After all, I've been known to quote this...:

"As a matter of fact, I think I know more social networks than people..."

I always argued the notion of outbrain being a social network. That's exactly what I was trying to avoid! I didn't want to enter my contacts in the 173rd site where my only real practical use would be invitation management... I have enough of that on LinkedIn and FaceBook, etc, etc!

But it kept bugging me... after all, it is true that outbrain is a platform for social recommendations of blog content... hmmmm - did we fall in the trap we were trying to avoid?

Then one day, my co-founder Ori made a brilliant observation:

outbrain is an implicit social network

That's it! The world of social networks breaks into 2 categories: explicit networks and implicit ones. I think they can roughly be categorized as follows:

• Explicit Social Network - a person is defined by the people s/he connects to
  (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace are good examples)
• Implicit Social Network - a person is defined by his/her interests
  (Last.FM, Amazon, Netflix and outbrain are good examples)

The power of implicit social networks is that they are not limited to the people you happen to know. Their weakness is in letting algorithms make social decisions for people. If the algorithms are good and the data set is comprehensive, magic happens. We're getting there...

What can we learn from iLike?

Since introducing its Facebook app, iLike has been growing like crazy (300,000 users per-DAY????... wow...). A lot of people obviously find this to be a very very very useful tool.

In ways, iLike is doing with music what we aim to do with blog content over at outbrain.

So I was wondering - what can we learn from them? If you like iLike (hmmm...) - what is it exactly that makes this app work so well for you? Why do you recommend it to others? Is the Facebook virality its main cause for success? Or would it be as successful independently?

I'd love to get any feedback you have on this subject in the comments. Thanks!

Favorite posts on WebX.0, take 2

A couple of weeks ago we released the v.1 of the outbrain API. This allows RSS feed aggregators (or publishers) to integrate full ratings capabilities into their services.

This week we're adding a neat little feature to the API, enabling partners to get the top rated posts for each blog, as rated by the outbrain community. I posted a few top-5 lists (for Seth Godin's, Guy Kawasaki's and Joel Spolsky's blogs) over at the outbrain blog.

And here are the current top-5 favorite posts of this blog, as rated by the outbrain community:

1. outbrain, funding, bubbles, etc - rated 4.83 out of 5
2. Movie Theatres 2.0 - rated 4.5
3. Idea: Cooking timer site - rated 4.5
4. Favorite posts on WebX.0 - rated 4.43
5. Supermarket 2.0 - rated 4.4

Cool!

outbrain, funding, bubbles, etc

This morning we announced the closing of our seed financing by LGiLab (www.lgilab.com),  GlenRock Israel (www.grg.co.il), and Sigma PCM (www.sigma-pcm.co.il) among others. We wrote about this on the corp blog, and more coverage is on Mashable, TheMarker (Hebrew only), alarm:clock, Ouriel's blog and StartupIsrael.

One of the reporters talking to me this week asked/hinted at outbrain being a bubble company founded with the intention to flip it to a Yahoo or Google in a few months. As I'm allergic to that notion of 'build-to-flip', I thought I'd share some highlights of my email response here:

I know this probably sounds to you like a Bubble2.0 thing, but -
My track record has been in building a long-term, sustainable, revenue-generating and independent company. That is the *ONLY* model I am aware of for building a company. I don't think there is such a thing at all to 'build a company in order to sell it'. The companies that are sold (or - flipped) are the very few that happened to luck out. Statistically I think you probably have better chances of beating a Vegas casino than you would in selling a company that was built to flip (and Vegas is much more fun than the blood, sweat & tears of entrepreneurship!!... ;-)

I think it's foolish to start a company without a clear path to making $$. Given my experience in building one of the only contextual ad networks in the world that's successfully competing with Google AdSense, I (and my investors) have a lot of confidence in our ability to monetize the outbrain service when the time is right. We all felt that focusing on that part of the business now would be a distraction, and I think our community members will agree.

Feel free to take the angle that will interest your readers, but you should just understand that my approach to building companies is very very very different from that of a 1st-time entrepreneur who's dazzled from acquisition like those that Flickr or del.icio.us had, and is starting a company that will be built with $50K and sold to Yahoo within a year for $10M. All that stuff is completely not in our lexicon... ;-)

The Digg Idiocracy

I'm often asked whether, at the end of the day, outbrain isn't just a variation on the Digg theme. While the answer is clear to me (NO!), it's sometimes difficult to convey.

Today I read a nice post over at uncov.com about the recent Digg HD-DVD encryption key debacle. I couldn't have said it better...:

"Digg users champion democracy and the power of the people but lets be honest: Digg is an idiocracy run for and by the idiots. Their sense of false rights would be funny if it weren't so sad. It's a linkdump where people submit or buy links to drive traffic to their blog and not much more."

Digg is a great place to visit, IF you have an hour to blow on stuff that bored teenagers find to be cool.

Sharing my favorite posts

How many times did you finish seeing a wonderful movie, and said to yourself "whoa - this movie was so good, I'd like to tell all my friends to run and see it"?

But then when you got back home - how many times did you actually write an email about the movie and CC'ed your whole address book on that email? I'll take a wild guess - you haven't.

Blogs are the same. I read a ton of blog posts and find myself daily thinking "this was an excellent post that I'd love to share with my friends/family/blog readers/peers/etc". Sometimes I email the link to a couple of people. If I have time, I might write a full post about it on this blog. But usually I don't have time to do either and those gems I find go away without any of my friends ever knowing about them.

Netflix has a wonderful solution for movies - You tell Netflix which movies you loved, and they in return aggregate and package those recommendations in a useful way that is automatically shared with all your friends (well - those who use Netflix at least). Your friends get access to the brilliant movies you find, and vice versa - you benefit from the gems that other people you trust find.

At outbrain we're trying to do a similar thing for blog posts - you rate the stuff you read, and we'll package and share it  in useful ways among the outbrain community.

Outbrain's new blog widget which you can see here... --------------------------->
...contains those blog posts that I recently read and found most interesting. Those are the posts that I'd love to send each  one of you by email every time I stumble upon them. But I don't. This is now the best place to peak over my shoulder and see  the best things I read recently. I think you'll enjoy the stuff that shows up here.

As of today, we're opening up this widget for more bloggers to use on their blogs. If you have a blog and are interested in getting  this widget - drop me a note:
galai [at] outbrain [dot] com

Or register here.