Tech Your Universe

I spoke on a panel for Social Search yesterday, representing Wikia Search. More info.

I enjoyed having an audience for Wikia Search to be demonstrated and displayed, particularly this audience — which I would consider the upper echelon of technology in Silicon Valley. I met a few intelligent people, and saw some familiar faces from Yahoo!. Overall I think it went well. I wasn’t aggressive enough about butting in; I didn’t speak much, but when I did, I think it made sense. DJcline.com covered the event and is going to be doing a write up in a few days, so we should see pictures and videos up there soon, I’ll update with a link when it is available.

Update: Here it is from Jason’s Ustream:

Broadcast by Ustream.TV

There was a big focus on monetization/advertising, which I found odd for a search technology conference. Perhaps a sign of what people are worried about? Reminds me of the big focus on monetization we saw right before the Web 1.0 bubble busted. Anyone remember the "B2B" craze when "B2C" fizzled? The cycle goes innovation->consolidation->innovation->consolidation->… I think we are entering a second round of consolidation. Time to buckle down?

It became obvious that the definition of "Social Search" was unclear. The panel was clearly bifurcated (as one audience member eloquently put it). With Facebook and Friendfeed (finding people) on one side, and then Wikia and Mahalo (community/people powered search), there were two camps, and neither one was truly "Social Search".

When this audience was thinking about Social Search, I think they were expecting for search results to be filtered based on what people similar to them were interested in. That sounds crazy to me. If I want my friends opinion on a local restaurant, I’ll just ask them. I don’t want a search engine to only search through my friends comments. No offense to my friends — but I want their input *and* everyone elses.

I think the valley is still trying to figure out what Social Search really is. It’s probably better to label Wikia as "Community Powered Search" than a "Social Search". We are focused on improving algorithmic search results with people’s input. Same for Mahalo, who was also on the panel (represented by their CEO, Jason Calacanis). I think Mahalo is the closest thing Wikia Search has to a competitor right now. They have a hybrid Wikipedia/Google approach, with paid editors.

I think the folks in the audience were entertained, engaged, and learned some stuff, but at least a few came expecting something different than what the panel had to offer.

Jason from Mahalo lived up to his reputation. He led out the panel publicly bashing Jimmy Wales based on personal issues, and it was up to me retort. I took a deep breath, rose above, and focused on what the crowd came to listen to — search and technology — not Ego battling. He stopped with the insults and we got down to business, but kept up the cynicism/aggression, at one point telling Facebook that they will never be able to monetize their traffic through advertising. Audacious!

I sympathize with him — he must spend a lot of effort and energy justifying to himself and/or investors why Mahalo his better than Wikia Search. Wikia Search must be viewed as a big threat, so his insecurity manifests itself in odd ways. I’m told that he has a past reputation for his attitude and this is "just how he is, it’s not personal". Best of luck to him with this approach. Sometimes I wish I was more bold, brash, and outspoken. It might be a good way to get attention; and it certainly made the panel more lively. Jason — thank you for providing the entertainment.

It was fun. It was good for me to be in the hot seat, and the preparation I went through ahead of time did help focus me and think through a lot of challenges that lay before us at Wikia, including:

1. Spam control
2. Reputation/Quality of ratings
3. Openness and transparency

Special thanks to Robert and Safa Rashtchy for putting the event together, it was a blast.

So what is Wikia? What are they up to? Here’s my perspective and opinion as an employee. Wikia was founded a couple of years ago by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Wikia is a separate company from Wikipedia, even though the name is close and they share a founder.

Wikia’s core business model is to build community sites based on the Wiki concept. We all know Wikipedia - Wikipedia focuses on encyclopedic level knowledge of a subject, Wikia goes further and gives the community a place for detailed information about each subject.

For example, I love the TV show Family Guy. It’s great. Now from Wikipedia’s perspective, the information on the Family Guy Wikipedia page should include:

• Characters and descriptions
• What network the show is on
• How long it’s been running
• Brief Staff credits (important actors, director, creator, etc)
• Any cultural impacts the show has had
• Criticisms

You know, encyclopedia worthy stuff. However, Wikipedia doesn’t want it to become a fan page. Wikipedia discourages the use of trivia on their articles, and they don’t want detailed accountings of every Family Guy episode. This is where Wikia steps in. When there is a community around a particular concept, and it exceeds what is worthy of Encyclopedic content, Wikia provides that community with a way to share all of this information very thoroughly, with a site that is themed appropriately. End users are encouraged to provide in-depth information about the topic for the world to see.

Some notable examples:

• familyguy.wikia.com - Gather around Spooner Street for the best collection of useless information on Family Guy
• muppet.wikia.com - a wiki dedicate to every thing Muppets. This particular wiki is co-maintained by one of the dedicated Wikia product folks. Go Danny!
• www.wowwiki.com - a thorough World of Warcraft wiki - this is the 2nd largest Wiki in the world, after Wikipedia.

Now Wikia is also working on Wikia Search.

As a preface - I think that the idea of closed source ranking algorithms are destined for extinction. See a previous post on why I think the community will replace Google– Note: I wrote this before I worked for Wikia, and before I knew they had a search. We need an open and transparent solution for web search. I don’t know about you guys, but whenever one company grows too powerful and omnipotent, I have these visions of a Big Brother slapping me on the shoulder and telling me what I do and don’t like. I’m not going to name names. *Cough* Microsoft *Cough*, but let’s just say no one likes Big Brother.

On the flip side, the trend we’re seeing with successful web companies is openness, and this will continue. One of the best and most obvious example is Facebook and their API. Facebook has successfully distanced itself from the competition by enabling users to build applications on top of their platform. Hats off to them.

Psst. Rumor is that Yahoo is working on something similar to enable developers to use Yahoo data and infrastructure to build applications. Shh.

Good companies are open companies. Jimmy Wales likes to say that Wikia Search is a political statement, and in some ways it is. Wikia is saying that search should be an open, transparent effort that that is controlled and managed by the community.

For example, on Wikia Search, if I do a search and the results don’t make sense, I can change them. If their is spam, I can remove it. We’ve all done searches where we get back a page that is a link farm. With Wikia, you just remove the result.

For a great demo of this, watch this video:

Often times the 1st result in Google is a good result. But sometimes it’s the 2nd, 3rd, or even 20th result that is the best for a particular query. If you find this, shouldn’t you be able to make this the first result for someone else? Wikia thinks so.

I’ll wrap it up with this — Organizing the Web’s information should not be controlled by one company, but it should be controlled by the community as a whole, and Wikia is looking to enable developers and users to do that through their platform — and in a nutshell, that’s what Wikia is up to.