When Mahalo launched about 16 months ago, we called it a human-powered search engine and began thinking of it as a Google competitor. But it’s so-called “guide pages” for topics as diverse as the Boston Marathon and Patriotic Drunk Rednecks provide not only links but quick facts, making Mahalo an editor-driven, Wikipedia competitor as well. And with a new site-wide design launching today, Mahalo sharpens its focus on the news cycle and competes more directly with sites like CNN and a multitude of news aggregators.
CEO Jason Calacanis explains how inspiration for the new design came from noticing how a core group of about 10-15,000 visitors refresh Mahalo’s homepage several times a day to check for new featured links, which change 2-3 times per day and direct users to guide pages about current events. The new design enhances Mahalo’s standing as a news aggregator by making these featured items more prominent on the homepage. A new “top news” box (see above) dominates the top left area of the homepage and displays excerpts from relevant guide pages.
But most importantly, Mahalo now features a new “liveblog” system that delivers one liners about world news as it breaks, such as “Man arrested after threatening bar patrons with a chainsaw” and “Brooke Hogan Says ‘No’ to Playboy”. Calacanis recalls how Peter Rojas pioneered the practice of liveblogging at Engadget and suggests that Mahalo is essentially applying the same technique to the entire world. Each post to the liveblog gets placed into a category, such as “Crime” or “Politics”, and most contain at least one link to a related guide page.
While 100 full time editors work to create Mahalo’s 100,000+ guide pages, Mahalo has employed only 4-8 full time employees to work on the liveblog (although they will work collectively around the clock). To spice things up a bit, Mahalo has set up a dedicated liveblog section where you can watch the employees and ask them questions as they work live on Ustream.
Calacanis says Mahalo plans to break out each news category into its own section and give each its own Ustream feed. Later on, we may also see RSS feeds for each category and a proper API to syndicate the liveblog’s news items elsewhere.
Disclosure: We have no financial interest in Mahalo. However, Jason Calacanis is a partner on our annual TechCrunch50 Conference.
Not sure if that makes Mahalo more worth using than it did before.
The liveblogging of the top headlines seems similar to the whole idea of fark.com or certainly could end up like that
Well it seems like after all that hoopla about social powered search, he ended up building weblogs 3.0
Wonder if AOL will buy it again?
…and if a voting system is implemented it’s propeller?
Is it me or do guide pages in Mahalo remind you of lenses in Squidoo?
If Calcanis weren’t the Danny Devito to your Arnold Schwarznegger (in the movie Twins)… there is no way that Maholo would ever get a mention on Tech Crunch. It is completely without any value or merit in Web 1.0, 2.0 or beyond. Worst part is that Calcanis seems to have run it like a Chinese sweat shop, even though his entire business plan involved the “human” element… didn’t seem too brilliant to antagonize the brains that make up your own search engine?
Retarded Idea + Horrible Implementation = FAIL
Dead pool this thing already and you two kids get on with making five million each with your TC 1000 event for next year.
win
Interesting that Feldman is your hero, considering Feldman and Calacanis are good friends.
Instead of spewing invective with nothing to back it up, why don’t you offer us some legitimate reasons why Mahalo is a bad idea, or why it is poorly implemented?
As for the work environment, Jason has never made a secret of the expectations of workers he has at his company. If that’s not your style, no big deal, you don’t have to work for him. Seems like there are enough folks that do want to work for him, though, and they’re grown-ups, they know how to take care of themselves.
Unless there is something missing here…. having a search engine that is based on human sweat-equity is like promising to drive all your best friends to work every day… but you happen to have 1,000,000+ “friends”… it is an impossible business model.
Loren Feldman may be “friends” with Jason in the same way that you are “friends” with the guy who you are forced to let into your country-club because you are afraid that he might shine the light of day on you for being “exclusionary”.
Loren speaks the truth, just like Ted Dzubia and others… and for that you have to respect the guy. He makes no bones about being a total asshole about it, but it is hard to fault that behaviour in the world of coolaid-drinking, valley startup douchebags who think that one good business deal makes them the saviour of all others.
This post about Maholier than though is more Arrington at his finest… pumping his pals and insiders. There is plenty of online “facts” about why and how FAIL is printed all over Mahooplah, and why Jason should accept it and move on. He’s clearly found his gold-mine with Arrington in the TC10,000 event each year. Why claim to be what he is not? He’s Scoble with a better haircut and an annual payday.
scoble looks like a mental patient
I like it! Never underestimate Jason.
Brilliant! 10-15,000 core users should be able to generate and consume lots of incremental content. Every little bit counts when your model is dependent on page views.
Wow, he really is trying to be the next wikipedia. That liveblog page needs some work (gray text over gray background does not work too well). Hopefully they will stop calling it a search engine since it is far from one.
I don’t get this site at all. What’s the purpose? The new home page is a trainwreck, with a ton of SEO link bait thrown in at the bottom of the page. Is this part of the re-design?
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I kinda like the new design.
homepage is an improvement i wonder why it took so long. someone over there decided to get serious. the previous homepage was worse than mine. and i dont have 21 million behind me. Great to see someone now has a vision over there. The old homepage was an instant turn off. I will now give them a second chance.
MyLocator.com
Many other sites have this feature as well. It’s called news. They have headlines, oh I’m sorry “one-liner liveblog thingies”, and everything.
not sure i understand what mahalo is really about ??
It’s about Jason Calcanis and a group of people who “dig his steez.”
this guy is destined for a major flameout. this is what the world needs, another CNN but without ANY credibility — nice idea!
It’s not even a good idea. Top that off with the fact that Jason Calcanis is a 100% Grade A asshole. Why anyone would want to work for him or with him is beyond me.
Wake me up when he does something innovative (unlikely).
Didn’t someone already try this?
All the folks criticizing this for not being new or innovative are missing the point. Who cares whether or not this is new or innovative? And I don’t see Mahalo billing it as such, either.
Mahalo is responding to the needs of its core group of active users. They’ve added features and adapted their model to go with what is keeping users attached to their product. Does it matter that it’s not the freshest idea in the known universe? No.
Are “news aggregators” becoming the new “news papers” of the web? Nationwide there are thousands of local and state newspapers that report the same information as the big ten, plus their regional stuff. Does that mean that aggregators can make a living if they just stick around for more than a year and can build a base? Is it OK for the mechanics to not be unique? Is the core of the business in how you manage your community (Digg vs Reddit vs Mahalo) ?
Scott Cranfill luuuuuuvs Mahalo.
Maybe I do. Just trying to add some perspective. If you don’t like Mahalo, that doesn’t bother me. But legitimate reasons why are a lot more interesting than cowardly flaming.
I like About.com 200x better than Mahalo. Also, I think Jason is a little sissy with a girly voice.
is Jason Calacanis now qualified to judge other start-ups now that the old Mahalo just failed?
“The old Mahalo” is still entirely intact. This is merely a shift in what is emphasized on the front page of the site. The “human-powered search engine” is still very much alive. It’s a little premature to say that has failed.
Hmm, after giving Mahalo a 2nd try, I’m wondering if they have 10k retards hitting there homepage or maybe just 10k bots. Other than the questionably pretty style of the site, it is lacking any real meat on most topics, with the only real offsite links being stupid google ads. Maybe they should just do one-liners to pages with just the one-liner and google ads. They could get rid of the rest of their staff and just employ the 4-8. The user experience wouldnt’ be much different.
it still sucks and looks nasty. stupid site.
Mahalo is a crass idea begging for success rather than a hungry businessperson trying to solve a problem. This guy is dying to be rich and I do not think Mahalo is going to get him there.
What the hell does being rich have to do with it? The guy just bought a Tesla, it’s not like he’s destitute or anything.
I look at Mahalo in the same light as ChaCha. Both just not scalable.
Mahalo is also dependent upon the SEO of content that is openly available elsewhere. So, a weakness would be Google adjust algorithms and most of the content seems duplicated.
Mahalo is way too labor intensive and must have a ridiculous burn rate! It is like having 100 people dig a ditch with a shovel when you just need to build a backhoe. I can understand there are two ways of doing things, but this just seems like the opposite of efficient.
Kudos if they can make it work. It wouldn’t be the first start up to be successful based on hype.
Exactly!
I don’t get why everyone in these comments are bitching about Mahalo.
I think the new idea is genius! I always thought Mahalo was dumb, but this new design puts it in a much different arena. No longer is it just about search. It’s now an interesting and possibly time-consuming news aggregator that just might keep me myself exploring the site just checking out cool stuff. This is the fist service to offer a reasonable way to get breaking news as it happens. The design, while graphically not so great, is pretty good at laying out the top stories in different sections, and being able to go to a summary page rather than an article is really helpful. The article aggregation is really much more useful than a constantly changing Wikinews article. More so than Google search, it’s previous supposed ‘competitor’, and more so than Wikinews — Google News, Yahoo News, CNN.com need to watch their backs.
The redesign looks clean and very user-friendly, but it seems like a hard niche to make any kind of dent in seeing how they’re becoming more and more of a destination site. They are doing a lot of stuff and if it all comes together, then there’s definitely potential to do some damage.
I mean, they’ve got 2 million people visiting with only launching about a year ago, which definitely isn’t too shabby. They should definitely give a shout out to Fark though with the new Live Blogging redesign.
I really really need to have a beer with Jason sometime… a little nuts, but show me a successful guy who isn’t.
More thoughts on the redesign can be read here, if interested:
http://blog.hub...atest-redesign/
what is mahalo again? seems to me like a solution looking for problems to solve
Um, that’s FARK!
Yeah, Fark ripoff
For an independent to move into this direction and compete with global media news organization is extremely refreshing. This is media for the people by the people and not filtered with big business in mind… next step, lifecasting.
Isn’t Mr. Hendrickson using the word “competitor” very, very loosely? He says that Mahalo is a competitor to Google, Wikipedia and CNN.com? Really? Are they even aware they are competing against Mahalo? No disrespect to Mahalo but I’m guessing their traffic is about 1/1000, maybe, of any of those three. I drive a car, does that make a competitor of Jeff Gordon?
Last time I visited Mahalo I was super impressed by the design of the site. What happened? This was a terrible step back.
this is horrible….wtf were they thinking? Does the site even make revenue?
Your comment is horrible. Wtf were [i]you[/i] thinking?
I think the “Liveblog” thing is cool. Anyone knows if there are any similar Drupal modules for that?
I like it, it kind of reminds me of PopURLS, where you can just go to one page and get get lots of info about a bunch of things. This could be a handy page to hit each morning to see what the latest news is.
Btw, the anti-Calacanis crew that rolls in each time he is mentioned on TC is getting old. If you don’t like him personally, no-one gives a flying f#%!. Mahalo should be judged on it’s merits as a product, not because you hate the founder.
No, the issue is about the fact that Arrington has a double-standard. He treats those people with whom he sleeps or eats differently than all the others on which he reports. The fact that he’s got his hand in Jason’s wallet and vice-versa is VERY relevant. Even more so than the crappy business model of Mahalo.
If it were any other owner of the company, it would either get ZERO attention or would get SLAMMED by Arrington. That is the issue.
…no.
Why would a site by Calacanis not be mentioned on a site like TechCrunch?
My two cents.
Mahalo’s a human powered search engine.
With that in mind and Google being the take all, how do you grow your audience and make them stay longer on your site?
I think they just answered that question.
I always liked seeing Mahalo Daily on the homepage but it didn’t make me come back every day.
They also showed us some headlines, but that never made me come back on a daily basis.
The new design might change that.
It’s better organized.
What they’ve done is better than Yahoo’s homepage. It updates faster.
Yahoo’s sometimes two days behind the news.
I don’t get that, but there’re more things I don’t get about what Jerry does.
Anyway, if only Mahalo had a finance section I would definitely visit it every day.
The new design makes me stay longer on the site, which is what they were trying to accomplish but I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. I get easily annoyed when I have to wait for what they are trying to show me.
I like to just scroll down like on Digg or NowPublic and see whether there’s something interesting.
I can click on the next button but I don’t like to click that much.
When I just let it play, the news changes , which is good but it sort of feels like an annoying advertisement. Maybe that’s just me?
I will visit it more often and maybe I’ll get used to it.
Also, it felt a bit awkward having those play / next buttons above the headlines. They should consider having a see more button underneath the headlines.
Also, I didn’t really look at the categories, maybe that’s because there’s too much text to look at.
I think the new design is a good move but it may need some tweaking.
I think this is a sign that the human powered search aspect of the business is failing. I tried to use it, and it was terrible. I will never try again. How do you deal with that? You get someone to use you for some other lame web 2.0 reason.
I think of it as a nice experiment, a blend of technorati-wikipedia-digg-fark? I wish them luck!
Juan
http://www.widexplorer.com
not a techno person…but trying to understand..why everyone is getting so bothered about someones triumphs in getting forward, l think l understand Mahalo a one stop site for everything,but personally drudgereport.com has always been my first stop for news and google for others, so what if you dont like Mahalo..dont use it, but dont tear down Jason because he is being productive, to me thats just pure jealousy
Mahalo looks like it’s builit on black hat per Mike’s post: http://www.tech...rect-editorial/
Slow moving trainwreck of a thing
Check out this interview with Jason at the FOWA in London where he announced the launch of mahalo liveblog:
http://uk.intru...more-_a460.html