Just pinging this list to make sure everyone here is seeing the new
launch today... lots of new features, new and much better index, etc.
Getting favorable reviews so far...
My first question is how the other people who wrote reviews knew about it already. Did they find out by themselves as soon as the got up in the morning, or were they told about it? And in this second case, they were told by whom? Anyway, the real question is how come the list of people who are really interested in the project never knows what is going on in it?!
Is Jimmy Wales following Jason Calacanis strategy and thinking the main advantage of having a community is doing viral marketing of their product? But hey, the people subscribed to the Wikia Search list knew that the new features of Mahalo were being launched before it was publicly announced! So looks like Calacanis is doing a much better job at that. To be fair, Jeremie Miller told us they planned to launch the new features sometime (almost one month ago), when John McCormac asked if there was any updates. Now let's compare that with the almost daily updates that I received when I was in the Mahalo list.
So, basically, this is how it works: if you are a developer, maybe you can find your way through the code (after you find the code itself, which isn't exactly a straightforward task), and then you can try to contribute. From the activity I see on the dev lists they don't talk much to each other, but it is enough to get things done. However, there is one not so little problem with this approach: although they say the project is open source, there is no license! And if you aren't a developer, your contribution is limited to promoting the site and using it.
Now, about using the site. They really have new cool features! The interface improved a lot and you have much better control over the search results. You can not only give a rating to each link, but also edit, delete, add, etc. I think this is how it should have been from day one. There is even a feature in which you can change the background of a search result to add a relevant image. On the other hand, the index doesn't seem to be that much better. It's still missing lots of sites and sometimes the same site appears more than once. So I'm not sure it is really ready to be used in large scale yet, what is important to get the critical mass needed to make collaborative production work.
Wikia Search started as four organizational principles: Transparency, Community, Privacy, and Quality. But the real work is done by a small group, cathedral style, ignoring feedback that comes from the outside. So far the search quality isn't high and even the privacy isn't that much respected considering anyone can see the IP of the people who edited anything on the search results.
But it is slowly getting better. Let's see what comes next. Maybe they will even figure out how people can actually play a larger role in it.
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