Last week we wrote about a startup called IMshopping, which lets you ask questions to human shopping guides about products to buy. One of the ways you can do this is directly through Twitter by asking a question to @imshopping. I tried this earlier today by asking for Mother’s Day gift suggestions. Imagine my surprise when I started getting back answers not only from @imshopping, but also from @answers, lots of them.
The @answers account belongs to Mahalo Answers, the Q&A site that is run by Jason Calacanis. Could it possibly be that Mahalo Answers is hijacking questions directed at IMshopping. Yes, it is. My question is now posted on Mahalo Answers, where anyone there can answer, and every time they do I get another message on Twitter. I never posted this question on Mahalo Answers nor asked them to. Mahalo Answers is stealing my question, isn’t it?
Calacanis (who is our partner in organizing the TechCrunch 50 conference), confirms, “We pull in about 100-200 questions a day from twitter… Usually anything with ‘does anyone know…’” And only “less than 1%” of Mahalo’s total traffic comes from Twitter. I asked that also.
Finally, Calacanis points out: “It’s all public, so folks love it (ie free research).” I am not sure about the loving it part. If I ask a question on Twitter, usually I am looking for an answer from people who are following me. I don’t know if there is such a thing as answer spam—I mean, I did put the question on Twitter—but this comes pretty close. In the two hours since I posted my questions (I also asked for gift suggestions for my wife since we have children), I’ve gotten three answers on Twitter from IMshopping and 11 from Mahalo answers. Both link to a page where the question is posted, along with all the answers. IMshopping doesn’t send you a new tweet every time there is anew answer, which is a far less spammy way to do it.
Actually, I don’t really care that Mahalo is hijacking these questions if I end up getting better answers as a result. And there is an evil genius component involved which is admirable in its sheer audaciousness. Who steals somebody else’s questions?
So how do Mahalo’s answers stack up to IMshopping? To be honest, I found both sets of answers equally unsatisfying. The guides on IMshopping suggested a “personalized oversized metal family tree sculpture,” an engraved wooden keepsake box, personalized throw, and chocolates. The folks from Mahalo Answers came up with a digital picture frame, a gift certificate (thanks), tea, and time with her grandchildren. I am still looking for a good, original answer—something that is not too tacky would be nice. If you have one, please leave it in comments.
how much for that whiteboard sponsorship in the office, the one beat.tv has on there.
?
kindle, obviously.
This isnt really a big deal – friendfeed hijacks my Twitter posts, backtype hijacks my comments etc. Its call the internet.
And furthermore isn’t a good thing to have your question exposed as much as possible so as you will receive a good answer.
It is not so much that Mahalo is giving me more answers, it is that it is hijacking questions directed at a competing service. And placing my question on its site without my knowledge or consent.
Tell me, does it bother you that Google places your tweets on its site without your consent? Or do you have double standards? It’s ok for Google to be a scraper site, but for some reason Mahalo Answers scraping your tweets makes you mad as hell, and you’re not gonna take it anymore! Ahhhhhh!
I think it is a different context. Google indexes my Tweets and links to them for people searching for them. It does not present them on a Q&A site as original content.
Similarly, services like FriendFeed or Facebook even clearly show my Tweets as being Tweets, not re-purposing them.
Still, I am not really mad. IMshopping is the one who should be mad. Mahalo Answers is getting in between them and their users.
You could say Friendfeed is a competitor of Twitter – and they scrape tweets. Buts its not an issue.
There are plenty of other aggregation tools that do this to questions on twitter as well. This is the norm
Erick;
You can choose to make your tweets private, so that only the intended parties can see (and steal) them.
whom ever creates the greatest “answer machine” wins the digital media arms race.
KnowLocator.com – know it all
areyouthebiggestidiotintheworldlocator.com — well, are you?
HeIsAToolAsHisCrapLocatorsDontLocateAnything.com
IwishThePoliceWouldLetHimBackOnTheForceSoHeWouldStopSpamingTechCrunchWithHisShitLinks.com
Locator-spammer-dude, I think it’s time for an intervention.
I don’t know if you’ve read “The Secret” one too many times, but you’ve been at this – what – a couple years now? Seriously… what do you have to show for it?
After inundating TC with hundreds of your spams, the VAST majority of your 600 “social networks” have one member: you. The remaining handful have 2 or woo-hoo 3 members.
That’s a LOT of effort. Not to mention 2 years of your life. What has it gotten you? I’ll tell you what: Hatred, dismissal, and a lot of influential people who would NEVER use xLocator.com out of principle… even if it worked.
Which, BTW, it doesn’t. I decided to suspend disbelief for a moment and I tried your brilliant idea just now. I typed in “flowerslocator.com”. Oops. That’s not you.
Okay, so I typed “giftlocator.com”. Nothing.
So I began to wonder if you even had simple domains like “banklocator.com”. Nope. “flightlocator.com”? Nope. “travellocator.com”? Nope.
You see… there’s the big problem with your idea. If you don’t own the obvious domains that someone might try to use, the “type-in-URL-instead-of-search-engine” model won’t work at all. You don’t have any margin for failure. As soon as someone tries this concept (ie, types in “Something”Locator.com) and fails, they’ll stop trying and go back to Google (which they know works).
After trying repeatedly to reach your site by typing “x”Locator.com in various topic areas, it’s just bloody obvious that it’s a waste of time to try and find something that way. It just doesn’t work!!! Nobody with the SLIGHTEST bit of internet savvy would randomly type in URLs hoping to find the right one! Maybe in 1995. Not 2009.
In addition to that HUGE problem, you’ve ALSO got the classic network chicken-and-egg problem. Your network can only have value when it has lots of people using it. But people won’t use it until it has value.
I know you’ve done all sorts of mental gymnastics to rationalize your continuing with your hypothesis. But if I were you, I’d let it go. Take the $5k/year you spend on domain regs and go on a nice cruise. Then come back and create a real business. One that has a chance of making money. And one that doesn’t require you to spam every tech blog on earth.
i appreciate you candid arrogant, ignorant, opinion wRecks. your opinion dont hold water.
first of all TC does not allow worthless spam.
i appreciate you taking the time to suspend your first impressions. if you were smart you would know it only takes one good name to do it all. I have that. see homepage. i just so happen to have 1300 “natural languge” relatives with the same last name. you seriously want your lame domain name one channel site to compete with 1300 strategic master family network.
your right on track with your first keyword locator entry. I do own flowerslocator. i think we think alike in some ways. we must share something in common. are we in the same business? when you feel like coming out of the closet and share some of your substance feel free. thats what this site is all about…..sharing. my autograph ID is on every blog. wheres yours?
your a good thinker but not smarter than me in search. we have been at this search game for 10 years now and have the digital media landscape to prove it. our core value in the raw has never been greater. when people are forced to innovate the more they could only dream of owning a porfolio like our Platform.
You mention value. if you dont see value in my platform you dont know what value is. if you could do me a favor and watch one video on my site i would appreciate it. this video is discribing next generation internet and its all about the location, language and communications of the links.
your good at your intellect but not your hands on experience. i would love to compare the promise and potential of my startup with anything you have to offer. your HUGE problem is you blab before you ask questions. your not gonna be any good at giving people “answers” is you dont have a clue.
GoodLocator.com – forever appreciating
I put the video link about the future of the internet on my homepage especially for you wRecks. see me and Tim Berners have more in common than you can ever imagine.
http://www.ted..../talks/view/484
Oh sorry, I didn’t realize you were insane.
Uh… yeah… great idea. Go get ‘em tiger.
Sweet mother of God, this guy is insane. As a medical resident, I can probably diagnose 3 different mental disorders that are afflicting this guy just from his comment.
P.S. Techcrunch DOES allow spam comments. See yours.
No use trying to rationalize with the irrational. But thorough and nicely worded attempt there.
i have found the missing link!
http://www.ted..../talks/view/484
index the video to 6:05 and you will learn what comes first.
You truly made my day!
Hah. The quality of the questions suck anyway. It would be better off if they responded with http://lmgtfy.c...ers+day+present
Ask chacha too – go for the trifecta.
THIS JUST IN: Mild mannered and overall nice-guy entrepreneur Jason Calacanis does something mildly unethical!
More at the 6-o-clock news!
Mild mannered? He hasn’t been mild mannered since he beat his friend Kenny to a bloody pulp at a drunken tae kwon do practice in 1988.
Yeah, whatever OP. Harden up. This is the Internet. You publish shit to the world, it gets stolen. Come if you’re coming, otherwise change.
Forget your caviling about “answer spam” … take a step back and look at the big picture:
You know your mom better than the Internet does; buy her something she likes.
stop whining you pussy
lol
Answer Spam – I love the term!
I bought my mom a Roomba this year. I LOVE mine … he’s like a little robotic member of the family who cleans my floors while I … don’t.
Actually, using the term “question hijacking” is a bit overdo. What happened is not much different from search engines indexing twitter, and display your questions to the public. The only difference is that now your questions may be answered by people outside our your immediate Twitter circle, with varying qualities perhaps. This is actually a good thing. Remember the USENET newsgroups and IRC?
TweetBrain pulls tweets that contains certain keywords such as “anybody knows” or tweets with hashtags help, question or needhelp using Twitter API.
please see https://tweetbr...om/home/faq#u45.
Since all the tweets are public viewable, when you asked anybody knows, we assume that you are crowdsourcing your questions to the public and want to get an answer.
IMHO, TweetBrain’s way is even better, see for instance http://bit.ly/CDljK
This is not a big deal. It is part of social interaction.
Sending people automated @ messages is big time spammy, also smart.
Get her a Nabaztag, you won’t be sorry:
http://www.naba...m/en/index.html
If she gets lots of flowers, a nice taller vase is always welcome. My mom always has the problem of too many flowers given to her by her friends and not enough vases for them. Bonus points if you include some flowers or fill it with Ferrero Rocher chocolates.
Whatever makes her life easier is a great gift. Then there’s always pampering. Generic gift certs and gift cards are boring. A spa one is always a hit. I was getting compliments from my mom and my sister for 6 months after giving them each a Burke Williams spa gift.
This has been going on with job boards and the aggregators that take their content and build a business around it for a long time. Distribution. Some people want it.
I wold buy her a day at a spa, pedi, mani and massage. Beleive me she would love it.
Ask Aardvark!
Aardvark blows goats.
@Erick,
Interesting. We’ve thought about doing this, but it always felt a little sleazy. I’m still not sure if there’s a way to do it properly because of how it fragments a discussion.
If you’re still looking for quality answers, I suggest you try asking it on http://www.fluther.com
Ben, CEO of Fluther.com
Try hunch.com for drilled down suggestions.
With my inputs for wife/mother I got a portable iPod dockable stereo, garden lanterns, digital camera.
How about a bottle of vintage wine from the year your child was born? try vintagewinemerchants.com or similar.
Are you gonna blog what you actually bought now?
Eric:
Thanks for the post. It is flattering to us that Mahalo is starting to hijack our questions. (They are taking us seriously
)
Our service is much more than a general Q&A service, so we don’t consider Mahalo or any general Q&A site a competitor. Our focus is in integrating the shopping experience with assistance. We will continue to work towards helping users make shopping decisions online. Our users love the fact that they can not only get shopping assistance, but use us to do more extensive research on what to buy (using our universal wishlists/shopping bookmark). The quality of our answers are really important to us and our users and most of our effort (as an example the knowledgebase/learning system and routing questions to the right guides in the network) is in improving the quality of our answers.
We have a way for users to follow up on the answers and a lot of our users use that to interact with our large community of guides and get the best answer. You should use that to follow up on your Mother’s day question. (To be fair, there are so many choices for a mothers day gift, it is going to require some follow up to get a better answer).
Hope you continue to use our service and once again, thanks for the post.
Regards,
Prashant Nedungadi, CEO IMshopping Inc.
Seriously if you really want to know what to get her, sign up on my site. Yeah, it’s not a question/answer site, but imo, it’s the best at suggesting things to get friends and family (filters what they already have, mobile in-store access, et-al).
Bit of a time investment, true, but it returns pretty freaken good results. Better than anywhere else I’ve seen — and since I wrote the code, I looked at a TON of others (to know what I was up against).
Hello All,
I am a big fan of IMshopping! I found the answers very useful and in fact find myself building a big wishlist and buying faster than I normally would…
Yes it does take a follow-up question or two but that’s to be expected. If I were to ask a friend or sales rep a question face to face, I expect we’ll go back and forth..
Have you tried their clipping technology? Other than asking questions and building wishlists, I could browse anywhere on any site and just clip and save to my wishlists on IMshopping! I love that! So now my wishlists have answers from experts as well as clipped products all in one place. Then I decide which one to go with and click on the product icon and buy. Sweet!
Healthnut
San Jose, CA
We have also created a site (www.tweetRSVP.com) that pulls tweets that are “questions” and also tweets that are “offers”. We included additional features such as storing the tweets so they could be searched and/or emailed based on keywords input by registered users.
The site is new, but we have noticed that some visitors have used our site to provide answers to the tweets that we have pulled with the likely goal of establishing a relationship and then providing services in the future. I am sure that some people will view an anonymous response as spam, but there does seem to be many people asking questions that never get answers.
slow news day.
If spam answer accounts follow you, block them. I cant remember if you need them to follow you to block them, but if not, block them. Report them. Twitter is democratic like that.
Mothers day: if you live near a major city: membership to an art museum. Then all you have to do every year is renew it.
Here is what I find fascinating. In Jason Calacanis’ show “This week in startups” he was asked about what he thinks of the IMshopping service and he thanked them for “stealing” the Mahalo answers idea.
Now his company is hijacking their questions… Isn’t that funny?
The moment there are another 5 such services out there hijacking each others questions twitter will become a useless place to ask a question.
Bring on the report as spam button please!
Interesting way to use Twitter.
I have tried both services and there was is a reason that I used IMshopping. I loved the wishlist concept and the ability to grab what I liked from across the net also.
I would personally be disgusted to be spammed by Mahalo if I wasn’t using their service due to simple fact that I wasn’t selecting their service to begin with.
IMshopping should take it as a compliment and not sweat over a few reviewers comments about the products suggested. I saw some very neat ideas and I’m sure more and more will come up.
Hmmm that is very bad of Mahalo Answers, but one thing IM Shopping is becoming popular
I own twuestion.com and twuestions.com. I just haven’t had the time to do anything with them. If anyone is interested buzz me on twitter @smilbandit.
Too funny: one of the commenters we had to tell *stop* to last week (and they obliged) when they stole our questions from our twitter integration & imported them into their Q&A site.
Imho…this is theft. Yes, you can compare to Google all you want, however, with Google there is a robots.txt file you can put in place if you *don’t* want them indexing your stuff. Simple, easily understood AND they give you the tools to do it.
How do I tell Mahalo Answers to f$$$ right off? They don’t obey robots.txt? No? Ok, so, if we pull this same stunt & cite “fair use” is that going to hold water? No?
Gee…if we can’t do it to them, they can’t do it to another company (or site).
And, seriously…Q&A’s been around a long time…allexperts, wondir, keen, etc, etc…our site started doing Q&A in 2003, before any of the current largest Q&A sites existed (we beat Answerbag by a few months in launching…). So the claim of “IMShopping stole Mahalo’s thing” is complete BS. It also comes across as a completely clueless sound byte.
Yes, the claim that IMshopping stole Mahalo’s idea was hopefully a slip of the tongue. Nobody that knows the net well would make such a statement.
Btw, did mahalo patent this idea? Also how does Yahoo! answers feel about this? I dont think anyone cares. Fact is IMshopping seems to be focused on a niche that is useful to almost everyone out there. Shopping. I look forward to seeing how much more interesting and useful this will become.
1. As pointed out by the one of comments above: You can choose to make your tweets private, so that only the intended parties can see (and steal) them.
2. You are whining only because Mahalo is your competitor and bigger than you. You have a pronounced sense of insecurity.
3. Change your company name to Sour grape Advice.
oh yea, wasnt the concept of digg there before netscape tried the same thing with a different spin on that idea? …funny
Get her a gift certificate for an airline. There’s nothing a dedicated mother can use more than a getaway.
How about ….
…. buying nothing?
Why does everyone think that the way to show love is with purchases?
Make something yourself. A photo album, a set of pictures. Create a silly song.
Try to spend the least money and the most time on the gift.
Get your kids to help you make something for her.
http://www.inst...id/Mothers-Day/
David…wow. Holy crap.
Let’s see (this is about Mahalo, right?) they’ve raised…17 million
We generate more pageviews per visitor than they do (they are quantified…so, their stats are public).
And, FunAdvice is *bigger* in the US market than Mahalo…I just compared our Google Analytics unique visitors over the last month to Mahalo’s quantified stats. We beat them by about 80K visitors / month…and since 1/2 the world’s ad spend is in the US…well, I’m OK with losing to them (for now) internationally
Last…instead of thread hijacking, why not use some DMCA reference, or learn something about the internet before you say that just b/c content is there, somebody can hijack it?
Does Google, Yahoo, or MSN have that attitude? no, thus, robots.txt…and, btw: if you want to bash somebody why not put your reputation at stake rather than doing it where the world won’t know who you are?
BTW…buzzillions.com has had a q&a feature on their shopping site for a while, and of course, fixya is the leader in “social shopping q&a” from looking at their quantcast stats & reading here.
So…well, this is good press for imshopping at least, as they have a uphill battle. They have a neat toolset, though
You should have asked Aardvark and gotten real answer.
http://www.vark.com
Hi Erick,
The community at WikiAnswers.com (the Q&A site owned by Answers Corporation), has these suggestions for you – http://www.wiki..._Mother%27s_Day.
See also http://www.wiki....com/Q/FAQ/3551 for other items on the Mothers Day topic.
A summary on WikiAnswers.com and what makes it different from Q&A sites is here http://www.answ...ers_1-pager.pdf
Hope this is information is helpful to you and your readers.
I don’t find it very surprising that Mahalo is doing this. As a relatively tech-savvy person running a small business on the side, I search for tweets related to my product area (complaints about bed hogs) & reply to them. And in my day job at a big company, we try to always reply with an offer of help when people tweet about our products, particularly if they’re having a bad experience, and have gotten some kudos from customers for that.
By the way, are you still looking for a good, unique Mother’s Day gift? Ordinarily I would never spam your comments like this, but you did ask for ideas, so here’s one… check out my Bed Hog His & Hers Sheets at http://www.bedhog.com. Many moms say a good night’s sleep is one of the best gifts they could have, but with their hubby hogging the bed, it can be hard to get a good night’s sleep. It’s a bit late to get them shipped to you for Sunday, but if you buy Friday morning, I’ll be happy to drop them off at your Palo Alto office Friday afternoon
Good God, don’t complain. Your questions are being somewhat automagically syndicated to a web-based think tank yet you gripe. It’s like wishing for a million dollars, then bitching because you got it in small bills. I wish I could have all my mundane, stupid, afraid-to-ask-cuz-I’ll-sound-like-a-n00b-’round-the-real-pwnzers-questions answered by a huge, somewhat-captive audience dedicated to such pastimes without even asking them the question myself. Jason must be scratching his head hard over this post. What are you guys going to complain about next- more visitors than usual showing up without anyone claiming “We’re giving away BILLION$ on TC!”? Jesus Christ.
http://www.picanswers.com connects people that have questions about an unidentified item with a community of users that can offer answers.
It seems like Mahalo’s twitterbot has been entirely overrun by spam. Especially irritating given that many of these people aren’t asking @answers –> http://twitpic.com/90m68 (Spam Squared)
Erick, I’m disappointed that you think any form of “hijacking” is even possible on Twitter. If you are seriously trying to ask people you care about a question of any importance at all, surely you could use Facebook or give them a phone call. Twitter is still in large part aimless messages being thrown into the cloud. This is why I find Jack Dorsey irritating – he dreams up concepts and boundaries about Twitter that no one follows or believes in. Please don’t do the same.