More Mahalo
Huh. Just read about Mahalo’s new social network aggregation feature. As a concept I think this aggregation is an interesting idea, although, executions have thus far been pretty not great. I suspect nothing overly worthwhile will happen till data portability hits in one form or another…
Anyhow, I stomped over to Mahalo and registered me a profile to play around with this. If you’ve been paying attention to this blog (of course you have! what else would you be paying attention, to??) you’ll know that I’m already not a big believer in Mahalo’s search offering. So I was curious that they would be working hard on this aggregation part - you’d think they’d be focused on making their search not suck, given that… they’re a search engine…
Well, it turns out I needn’t have worried that they lost their focus. This aggregation is little more (and by little more, I mean nothing more) than you entering your username (or a url where a username is non-obvious) and they putting in links to your various profile pages. Just like almost every forum has been doing since time immemorial. Their big innovation is also providing them in tabs across your profile which causes your homepage to be placed in a frame on Mahalo. Eeeehhhhhh…..
I mean, I guess it’s ok. It’s a simple concept that’s maybe pretty useful if you’re part of a bunch of socnets - theoretically you could make your Mahalo homepage some sort of profile central. But I dunno, I remain unconvinced that this will attract too many users. I’m sure users who are there will use the service but ultimately I think it neither brings in new users (except those who just want to check it out once and never come back) nor will it add to user retention. As a feature, I guess it was probably relatively trivial to implement so worth experimenting with, so y’know. Whatever.
What do you think? Personally, trivial or not, I think they should focus more on search and less on not search.
January 29th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Thanks for the feedback, we are always striving to improve our search results in addition to any new features we bring online.
If you find we dont have a result page for a topic of your interest you can now help to create this page. Simple hit the “know a better link for…” to get the page started. You’ll get credit for creating the page and one of our guides may eventually build that page out to a full result.
Please feel to email me if you have any additional feedback.
Sean