Category Archives: ebay

stumbleupon bought by ebay

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 30, 2007 View Comments

Announced earlier today – eBay bought Stumbleupon.  I ran across Stumbleupon back in 2004 and ran the toolbar for awhile but ultimately dumped it.  Never got into the user generated recommendations thing myself.  That being said, I will say Stumbleupon has been this blog’s biggest driver of new users so it’s definitely got some juice as perhaps the Digg for the long tail.

Also some folks have wondered whether this means eBay’s looking to get into the recommendations space and given my involvement with Loomia I am curious to see myself.  Personally I don’t think an application based approach that relies on human voting is the right approach vs. Loomia’s automated system that relies on some very sophisticated analytical algorithms in order to recommend products or content.  But then again its not clear eBay plans to use Stumbleupon for user recommendations, but it will be great to see what happens. 

What is clear is that helping users find the products and content they are looking for whether through a lean forward approach like search or a lean back approach like Loomia’s recommendation service is something of growing interest for web publishers and retailers.

sometimes we forget where we are on the curve

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 10, 2007 View Comments

Friend and colleague Renee Blodgett (she can blame me for getting her involved in the people search engine startup Spock) wrote an interesting post about what she calls the web 2.0 echochamber.  Her point is that we in the online startup business can get wrapped up in the new and latest tech fad but often forgot our place as super-eager early adopters of new technologies and services.  To her point, my brother a 33yr old manager of a TGIF’s restaurant back east has never heard of half of the web services that Renee’s friends insist everyone is using.  My mom can still barely turn on a computer and my Dad, a pretty middle of the road adopter of new things, has barely heard of anything beyond yahoo, amazon.com, ebay and espn.com.  As a marketer, it’s easy to forget sometimes, just because it seems cool, doesn’t mean it’s mainstream.  And if it, whatever it is, doesn’t solve a real problem for a large group of people, then it’s not likely to go mainstream. 

Is it a generational thing like Renee posits?  Nope, I don’t think so.  We just sometimes forget the whacky insular world we live in SF, the Valley, Seattle and sometimes LA.  Does that mean Twitter isn’t important or potentially huge? Nope.  As the next generation comes of age – they like their previous generation’s counterparts in Europe and Asia are much more mobile.  But let’s not rush to distraction, remember not everyone is as infatuated with the latest and greatest as we are.