I think it is important to read more about epinions. Beyond the fact that it is pretty much dead today, was firesaled, and was had some nasty interpersonal personnel issues, I think it is a classic example of a company with a unmanageable story:<p>"Here's how it works: we convince people to write opinions. And then when someone else reads that opinion, and ranks it highly, we'll give the writer a piece of an affiliate link sale."<p>There's way, way, way too many steps involved in making a few pennies.<p>The story that you tell your users (all of them) is very important. Epinion's was pretty miserable.<p>A buddy of mine said that one of the reasons that Google's a money machine is that it is dead easy for a neophyte web advertiser to set up an ad:<p>1. Pick some words
2. Pick how much you want to pay
3. Done.<p>That's the level of story you want to tell.<p>Measure your story against that.
I love the fact that this aggregator pulls up articles before the bubble. The language and the tone of the entire article is like nothing can go wrong. It's great.<p>It's also interesting that the author of the article foreshadowed "Web 2.0" before it was coined 5 years later. The Tom Sawyer model. Brilliant.
> Everything is faster. Zero drag is optimal. For a while, new applicants would jokingly be asked about their ''drag coefficient.'' Since the office is a full hour's commute from San Francisco, an apartment in the city was a full unit of drag. A spouse? Drag coefficient of one. Kids? A half point per. Then they recognized that such talk, even in jest, could be taken as discriminatory in a hiring situation.<p>"Could be taken as"? It is discriminatory. And Epinions failed; the Reddit team built a more valuable property with a tiny fraction of the time and effort.
Dot bomb or not, this article does inspire me to go out and make stuff happen fast!<p>"This is not a strategy play, this is an execution play" sure describes a whole lot of web2.0 startups...
Still around since 1999, but it still sucks seriously does anyone even use epinions. I have never found it useful while searching and comparing products online.<p>I guess that is a good thing since we are working on a competitor of sorts.