Neomeme

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch invites us to abuse him. He’s dangling some Web2Expo passes in front of us hungry masses, but I can’t attend, what with school and all. I’m in this purely for the fun. Here we go:

Whenever Arrington writes how one service is better than another, established service and will overtake it he is dead wrong. I think somebody should write a Greasemonkey script just to add a big WRONG! to every time TechCrunch proclaims something better than anything else. Until somebody develops such groundbreaking technology and TechCrunch blogs about it as the harbinger of Web 3.0(It’s Web 3.0 because its advanced algorithms know when a TechCrunch prediction is wrong), we will have to resort to more low-tech methods. For now, I recommend adding a big mental NOT every time you see the word “better” on TechCrunch.

Case in point:

Business social network CollectiveX, which TechCrunch called,you guessed it, “better than LinkedIn“. It has “a chance to disrupt LinkedIn” even, oh my! I’m sure its “nice ajax features” and the ability to create groups made it a powerful competitor to LinkedIn, right?

A year later, poor CollectiveX has an Alexa rank about as high as this blog on a bad day, which is a shameful number indeed. And how does it compare to LinkedIn?

Yes, that’s right. 177 hits for CollectiveX, over 500,000 for LinkedIn. Not bad for a site which, from the looks of it, has about 24 regular members including, if you look closely, William Shakespeare, who I believe has been dead for several hundred years. On the plus side, they’ve really mastered the art of the Javascript rollover, so expect Arrington to call them Social Network 3.0 again pretty soon. If you look carefully at the three very diverse models symbolizing the site’s features for Professional Groups, Company Intranets, and Social Networks, you will see that they are all looking wistfully at something in the distance. Perhaps they are looking in the direction of LinkedIn, which has been wildly successful in the past year. “Take me with you!” say Company Intranets Guy’s eyes and eerily well-trimmed soulpatch. “I could be getting thousands of pageviews on MySpace right now with this pic” whispers Social Networks Chick through clenched teeth.

Or maybe they are looking in the direction of TechCrunch. “Why did you do it, Arrington?” the images of models on the site, which has become a ghost town, seem to ask. “Why promise us a glorious Web 3.0 future with Ajax and groups and a revenue model that makes sense?”. Did you do it for fame? Money? Power? Influence from a former client?” Or maybe, just maybe, TechCrunch was just completely wrong. It is not always wise to assume that a new upstart with a couple features you like will overthrow an established player, especially in a scene so heavily dependent on the Network Effect. As we prepare for the upcoming launch of Avanoo I am keeping these lessons in mind. We believe that we have something extremely unique with Avanoo, not just in terms of technology, but also in terms of a fundamental philosophy. But only time will tell if this will be enough to challenge the goliaths dominating the industry today.

Wowza. It is so much fun to write a post tearing something apart. To give TechCrunch credit, it took me a while to find a post where TechCrunch was completely wrong, and before I did, I found quite a few posts where TechCrunch was very right. Those posts made surprisingly accurate predictions about major industry trends, provided intelligent and in-depth insight into many new startups and were generally well researched and well supported. Upon further inspection, it seems that they were all written by Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Thanks so much!