Comments on: Mahalo’s Case Of Mistaken Identity

By: Kingo Vingo

Kingo Vingo — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:21:17 +0000

Don’t say a prayer for Mahalo now. Save it for the morning after:

http://www.yout...h?v=VCD4rtcOgHE

By: Dean Higginbotham

Dean Higginbotham — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:57:04 +0000

I kinda get the feeling Jason’s moved on…

By: Steve M. Parker, Jr.

Steve M. Parker, Jr. — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:19:13 +0000

This happened to me last night (actually about 24 hours ago). Didn’t seem as though when it logged me in as other people I had any controls though. Just seemed the whole process was broken.

By: Furi

Furi — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:01:55 +0000

Funny you

By: blah

blah — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:30:20 +0000

anyone have an idea of mahalo’s current revenue?

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:01:00 +0000

Looks like its doing pretty well to me!

————-

http://www.busi...-profits-2009-6

5.6 million unique visitors last month.)

By: Warren

Warren — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:55:17 +0000

I typed that into bing and got surprisingly useful results.

By: blah

blah — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:25:32 +0000

how many participants will mention caching during tc50? ^.^

By: English Purish

English Purish — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:25:54 +0000

should be ….

‘ The Gods *have * spoken ‘

genius…

By: 7p

7p — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:19:55 +0000

Hmmm consider me unsubscribed from Jasonnation thanks for the heads up.

By: spiffydabadass

spiffydabadass — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:52:38 +0000

Oh yeah, your site caching issue is “Powered by Edgecast” (see footer: http://www.mahalo.com/contact). Someone please clue these guys in on how to do site acceleration without caching dynamic content. This type of mistake is so 1999…

Mr. Mahalo CEO, here is Akamai’s number:1.877.4AKAMAI.

By: Sanjay Sharma

Sanjay Sharma — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:51:17 +0000

Yeah, I think so, especially if they architect virtual initiatives that cultivate enterprise e-services for the extended wireless channels used to scale transparent initiatives. Only then can they expect to optimize strategic convergence of their best-of-breed channels to build synergistic communities of empowerment. Such is the word of Sanjay.

By: Sanjay Sharma

Sanjay Sharma — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:47:14 +0000

Its a dessert topping AND a floor wax.

By: Sanjay Sharma

Sanjay Sharma — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:45:53 +0000

But my Learn PHP in 21 Days book said it was good to use page caching. $)&@% :

By: Sanjay Sharma

Sanjay Sharma — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:36:50 +0000

I thought it already was deadpooled, ok? The gods has spoken, and they say that nobody wants this kind of service, ok? At some point you just have to admit it ain’t “sticking”. Such is the word of Sanjay.

By: John

John — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:30:05 +0000

Mahalo will be heading to the deadpool. Employees are flocking out of the company. Mr. CEO needs to be @ his office instead of jumping around country to country every week. He needs to be a true CEO.

VC’S need to replace Jason, or get him focused.

By: MattW

MattW — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:06:32 +0000

Don’t know what stack Mahalo runs on, but this is exactly what happens if you blindly turn on output caching with the Zend Engine and are using PHP.

The actual result probably depends on the details of their user login system. In a system that sets a cookie only when a login form is POSTed, then the logins are probably not compromised. Some systems (such as PHPBB2) would “refresh” their authentication cookies on every page view, and in that case, enabling caching like this would log in users as other users.

Anyhow, it is very consistent with overzealous caching. The mahalo team should probably look into selenium for regression testing to spot emergent behavior with config changes.

By: Grunties

Grunties — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:31:47 +0000

I suspect it’s not a caching issue, it’s a failure during the process of creating bullshit users to take ownership of the content they’re scraping from from places like fluther.com .

Calacanis’s response to the open letter (in which fluther make the suggestion to highlight the obviousness of the theft) and subsequent C&D they sent tells you all you need to know.

By: James from FaceySpacey.com

James from FaceySpacey.com — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:50:59 +0000

I thought this was going to be an article about Mahalo’s IDENTITY CRSIS. Are they:

A) A Search Engine
B) A Wiki
C) A Yahoo Answers style Q&A site
D) Squidoo style SEO play
E) IZEA (i.e. they now do onsite Pay Per Post type stuff)
F) All of the above

Yea, all of the above, with no innovation, and they receive an F as their grade for their Web 2.0 startup project. Mahalo you suck, and it disappoints me that such iconic 2.0 names as Jason Calacanis does this garbage. Well not really, because it means there’s tons of room for everyone else to innovate.

By: James from FaceySpacey.com

James from FaceySpacey.com — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:43:33 +0000

Mahalo is one big glorified SEO play that didn’t even do a good job at it. If you check their compete traffic, they basically have 3 million unique US visitors per month. All that money invested, all that work, all that coverage in the blogosphere, and that’s all the traffic they get!

The thing is they far from got it right. 99% of all searches return search results most obviously scraped from Google, and feeds from flickr, youtube, etc. And ultimately have little relevance, and take you away from their site! They don’t even figure out how to keep you on their site. All their search results take you off the site. That’s the point of being the search engine they’re disguising themselves as, but what they really are is a portal and they should be sending people to pages on their site. But they haven’t figured out how to make more than 100k articles in 2 years. They’re just stupid.

I’m not even sure how they get the google results the way they do without scraping it from google with a million proxies rotating. It doesn’t seem like it’s sanctioned by google even, and last I checked they discontinued their API to get results from them.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:42:37 +0000

Why would you cache pages/info that are PERSONAL i.e. not shared? I don’t get it. I understand caching general areas of the site (public areas), but member control panels? What’s the advantage?

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:33:27 +0000

Well said. No one really uses Mahalo yet they are trying to stuff it down our throats.

By: http://www.compareuklifeinsurance.com

http://www.compareuklifeinsurance.com — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:26:34 +0000

Not the PR you should be giving to your sponsor. Give them some twitter love.

By: josh

josh — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:59:18 +0000

Mahalo is a joke, and only exists because Jason has some money to back it up. If it was something that a 14 year cooked up in their garage, it wouldnt have made it this far.

By: sttevo

sttevo — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:36:44 +0000

Fragmented caching problems like this are minor. Yes, it does look bad but if the user’s name is all that is appearing (and not allowing you access to their account) then I can think of a lot worse…