Wondering if you guys were me, what would you do next with Mahalo.

Background:

1. We've got a great team: tech, admin, research, and editorial.
2. We've got an amazing server setup and can handle massive traffic.
3. We've got 4,000 pages done and can do 500 per week.
4. The public is suggesting links already (do a search apple, iphone, a car or a tv show and you'll fine some suggested links).
5. Folks are not chatting on message board yet.
6. We have a very stable and robust technology platform (MediaWiki).

So, given what we've got... what would you do next?!?!? (Mahalo staffers please don't get involved in this discussion--interested in outside voices right now... we can talk about it at staff lunch!)

Mahalo for thinking about Mahalo!

Jason

Keep getting it out in front of people. Offer some sort of script that replaces keywords in text which link to Mahalo and show a popup or something of the first 5 relevant links.

Make it easy for someone to setup their mom and dads computer to use Mahalo. Offer a toolbar. Have it do the same thing as suggested above.

Continue building the community. Communities are tricky; find good people to help build it. It won't happen overnight, but you have 5 years to make it work.

Find a distinct message/cause to promote. Why Mahalo instead of Google? Tell people why on your homepage and every page that I happen to click through from someone else's site and land on. Right now you just say "We're here to help" with a link to the FAQ. "filtering out spam, and hand-crafting" is key and super important to know as soon as I hit the site. I can think: "Wow, cool, I don't have to worry about lil' Bobby finding porn results when he's doing research for his latest project." instead of "Gee, I hope our filtering software works."

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head... =)

Jonathan: EXCELLENT feedback. You're hitting on the issues we're buzzing around! Anyone else!??!?!

When you guys created that JFK plot page quick style I saw a lot of the potential power in mahalo. On breaking stories it will usually takes google 1-2 days to get good results on page 1. Sure many tech heads know about google news/blog search and sites like technorati but the public as a whole does not.

When stories like that break there is a massive desire for information, some people are happy with reading one article on yahoo or MSN but people like me want to hit several articles. It's nice to have a resource that pulls and catalogs the best links and offers additional content like video and perhaps links that are older but relevant.

So I would put a big focus on creating pages for breaking stories. Once I few people take notice of this you may find them hitting mahalo before anyone else.

Also the LOLcats page, this is great. Although I'm a little sick of that whole phenomenon its nice to see pages for niche and pop culture related topics. These are usually the most difficult to search for on a traditional engine.

You are 100% correct... we need to keep the focus on breaking news and ease off the lolcats!!! :-)

Any other features you think we should add?

Any plans to get into the image search market? Would be interesting to see what human cataloging can offer in this space.

People like images, and sometimes its hard to get relevant results.

Besides the breaking news angle, why not give some power to niche publishers who are first screened so that they could help build out topics they are ready experts in.

It seems that with so many people tackling micro topics with blogs and other web outlets, the incentive to "host" or "moderate" something in that topic would be incentive to help build Mahalo's lesser known corners.

All of this could be moderated at some level or the "niche moderators" could be screened in someway to make sure they are in fact "experts" in their topics.

Great idea!

When 9/11 first happened, I was sitting in some lame stats class @ KSU, and the only article I could find was a 2 paragraph story on Yahoo News saying it was a small plane.

Mahalo would have kicked ass for this use case.

I'll second all of Jonathan's ideas.

How about an affiliate program?

As far the message boards go, right now they're about as invisible as you could possibly make them. Give them a little more real estate on the SERPs. If a SERP already has discussions going on, show the discussion headlines right on the SERP (maybe only after guide approval). Put a button next to each of the main headings on each SERP that allows someone to start a discussion about that section with one click.

Here's an idea: Requested pages. Make a section of the site where users can suggest new pages, and other users can vote on them and suggest potential links for them, and the highest-ranking pages each week will be created by a guide.

Also, I think it takes too many clicks to report a broken link. The mechanism for that should be as easy and streamlined as possible, since on any human-edited index the number of broken links increases exponentially with time. I'm curious: Do you have a policy that makes sure every page is checked for broken links and outdated information every X months?

I would also like to see more pictures. Headshots for people, photos of landmarks, movie posters, etc.

Socialize. You have profile pages created ABOUT users (Jason Calacanis). But do you have profile pages created BY users?

1. Give users a page where they can share SNS identity stuff if they want, and have a button that follows them around Mahalo, that lets them add a subscription to a page they like onto their profile. Start agging up users into communities based on subscription matches, a la MBL.

2. Widgetize - Mahalo widget displays updates to the pages you subscribe to so you can share them on your blog, your FACEBOOK page, etc.

Mahalo = Wikipedia + SNS = Killer App

An RSS feed for updates to pages and/or a 'Google Alerts' type of system for updates.

I'd also consider doing a Google Alerts thing for when people suggest a new page or search term to have a page built around. If or when that page is built, shoot an email off to the people who suggested.

About the availability of the forums, make the links more prominent and let people know that their feedback and suggestions are integral to building the site. People take more pride in things they've helped build.

jason, i don't believe in your human-aggregated-news approach to make a difference with mahalo. why not simply stay focused on creating long-lasting quality content and omitting all the short-term stuff?

Pride + ownership == Success!

The recent changes page Jason linked to from his blog the other day is too hidden... maybe create a page for "Cool stuff you can do on Mahalo" that just generalizes where all of the special/hidden links are. It's a selling point in and of itself, and creates more stickiness around the site. You never know what interesting stuff you'll find.

Something like the Digg spy thing would be super cool too... of course, cool doesn't always mean useful. :-)

I too was going to suggest Widgetize, but was just beaten to it by Mr. Short. In the same vain, I would suggest partnerships. Although they can be deadly if you occupy too much time with them, some strategic partnerships across popular sites that also help promote Mahalo and its widgets can get more people contributing to the site.

Pictures! Right now the pages are all text (at least, the JFK airport one is...). Even if it's just logo's of the sources until there is a thumbnail / image of what is happening / provided by that actual link.

That would also let you quickly scan the page to see what you may not have seen already without having to click through. A source that has a different photo that you haven't seen from one of the other sources is more likely to have better and/or different information about the actual phrase/article/whatever anyway. No one wants to read the same article regurgitated 5 times in a row!

Jason, wonderful job with Mahalo so far! I can't wait to see where it takes us in helping organize the web by making it easier for us to find the content we are really interested in.

In terms of features/ideas for the site, here are just a few of my thoughts:

1) I think improving the SERPs to embed pictures and video content rather then just text links would make the pages friendlier. It's about having an actual universal search results page.

2) Submitted Links is great initial implementation but I think it needs to be taken a step further with a digg style voting.

3) How about letting users track/subscribe to topics (search terms) they are interested in. So if there is an update to the iPhone page, I want to know about it via my personal "Updates" page.

4) For the discussions to really take off they need to have some real estate on the SERPs but I would be careful how exactly you would highlight it because you also don’t want to take away from the actual results.

Just a few ideas to help, good luck and will continue to follow the site as it progresses us into hopefully the future of search.

Right on!

You're absolutely right about widgetizing Mahalo; it's just too hidden at the moment. A couple of Digg stories and articles from blogs just get you a short term burst in traffic; nothing sustainable until you deliver on a quick and easy way to continually drive traffic over. You're paying people to create it, now get that content out there!

Profile pages are the first step to actually building the community... it goes back to the pride/ownership thing mentioned above.

Well, what about lauching Mahalo in others countries ? You hire experts on the main countries (England, Japan, Germany, France...), they add there knowledge on the headings like News (the first one to begin with in my opinion), Television, Sports and so on. Each countries will have his own mahalo expert community.

Like this each countries will have his own mahalo with common data with the Us one and with more specific stuff depending on the countries.

Then you give tools to those experts in order to work together, for the creation of a global community expert.

I think that a growing community expert needs to be shown and to be known cause they are the reflection of your product and they are the base of the quality...they are the best sellers of your products....

Few thoughts...

Charles

I am most interested in the "live web" or "real-time web." I would like to go to a page that aggregates the most interesting/compelling live (streaming) content at the moment. ie a web guide to compelling live content. There doesn't seem to be a portal that captures or aggregates live content. ie for cspan stuff I need to go to cspan..for npr I need to go to npr..for conference streams I need to know about the conference...why not link to all this great content on one page that gets updated hourly. Just a thought! Good luck Jason.

The signal to noise ratio at Mahalo is amazing compared to most search sites, but your signal strength is still weak, and probably will be comparably for some time. You just can't index the type of data that a Google can, using only manual methods.

Instead of being a place to go and search, Mahalo can be a resource to learn more. Almost Wikipedia-like, except instead of giving people the information on your site, you link to everything of use about that topic.

You can take advantage of more of the social media out there already.

If someone searches for "Yankees" don't just give them a few links, but show the first four pictures from Flickr and a link to more, and an embedded video or two from YouTube and a link to more, and the top headlines from Digg/Netscape/Newsvine.

And of course there is always the idea of making it more community driven. Emphasize user-submitted links more. Emphasize voting more. Right now, some of your editor's choices are a bit arbitrary, especially concerning links to blogs. I know it is also early in the game, but giving the public more of a say may sort things out a bit faster.

Lots of great suggestions here.

Although this is general, I would find a way to differentiate myself from Wikipedia, either through building strong community, or through the many suggestions posted above.

The organization of the data is also a little haywire. I'm never really sure where to start looking as my eyes are inundated with information and there's no clear structure to it. It would be really nice to be able to minimize each field with a +/- deal so that users could only read the relevant information.

So here's a summary of what's been talked about so far:

* Getting it out there.

* Clear-cut non-geeky vision / mission
* Toolbar
* Widgets
* Badges

* Community

* Profile pages
* Voting up/down links
* Requested pages, vote up/down based on popularity
* Niche publishers auto-adding of links
* Message boards visibility

* Real-time breaking news focus to drive short traffic

* Results

* Pictures
* Too many clicks to report a broken link
* RSS Feeds around pages
* Google alert style notifications
* Internationalization
* Cleaner delivery/information design of results pages

Man this is awesome, but Facebook needs threaded messages!


What else??

I think Rajiv had a good point with #3 "How about letting users track/subscribe to topics (search terms) they are interested in."

Only I would take this a bit further. First, you aren't leveraging RSS as much as you could be. I'd like to see a way for people to create accounts, subscribe to topics and integrate "notify me" with this. Then each person can have their own personal Mahalo feed where they get updates on things that they are interested in.

Once you are tracking what pages and searches people are subscribed to you would have the information to start recommending other topics. In their feed you could include updates on topics they might be interested in based on their other interested. At the top of these posts they could have a message like. "Based on your interests we thought you might be interested in this." and provide links like "Add this topic to my interests or I'm not interested in this, don't show me this again." Of course people could choose to not have suggestions injected into their feeds.

I think something like this would be really great.

Meant to reply to group rather than Jason exclusively: Continue to ask the vital questions such as What has your search engine done for YOU lately? and learn how you can best cater to your potential community. I see what Mahalo is doing as a step in a much-needed direction toward simplification... landscaping, trimming the hedges, pulling the weeds and clearing the paths of debris so that we can enjoy all the Web truly has to offer. Widgets and feeds are good things... and don't overlook more traditional syndication and offline promotions/meetups.

Give me something to do on Mahalo!

I can't use it as search engine yet because it's not robust enough, but I check it every day because I'm a fan of Jason's blog.

Let me vote on something or add something or feel like I'm a part of it.

All of these suggestions I concur with. RSS is important, breaking news, badges. I wonder, Jason, if Mahalo has the potential to become a kind of uber memetracker?

The ability to pull in lots of sources via your own power RSS aggregation, has the potential for a great many applications for news, business, and other revenue streams.

Images? Not sure the world needs us for images, but let me think about that. Flickr and Google Images do such a good job I'm not sure what we would bring to the party.

Let me think about that one after we get to 10,000 pages.

Ryan: That is a good idea, and we're looking at partnerships like this. Again, something we would consider after we hit 10,000 pages.

Mahalo for the feedback!

RE: Badges -- You are 100% correct. We will get on that.

RE: A What is Mahalo page -- You are 100% correct. We need something easier to explain it.

Mahalo for the feedback my friend. Any chance you want to move to Santa Monica and work at Mahalo!?!?!? :-)