wanderingstan

The timing of Fred’s post couldn’t have been better. I choose to participate.

Lijit got it’s first negative review this morning.

Todd put it best when he said “Ouch”. But I see that Steve didn’t fully appreciate what Lijit really is. So what we have is a failure on our part to communicate what we are and what we can do. That’s better than if he had grokked the whole thing and still panned us.

It’s ironic that Steve Rubel works for Edelman, who published a report backing up the central thesis of Lijt:

“Global opinion leaders say their most credible source of information about a company is now “a person like me,” which has risen dramatically to surpass doctors and academic experts for the first time, according to the seventh annual Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey of nearly 2,000 opinion leaders in 11 countries. In the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today.”

People don’t want their top news stories picked votes from random nameless internet surfers who are mostly nerds (Digg, Reddit), they don’t want their search overlays to show mere statistical average ratings (StumpleUpon, WOT), they don’t want their ecommerce sites rated by opaque large corporations (Trust-e). They want to be connected to the friends and sources that they trust. Lijit must become that connection.

Here’s the reply that I posted on Steve’s blog.

Hi Steve! Lijit is based on my masters thesis (getoutfoxed.com), so I’ll try to explain a bit.

Most importantly, Lijit is *not* invite-only. Quite the opposite in fact! Any RSS or OPML feed can be an informer in your network. We’re more in like a newsreader than a walled-garden social networking site.

Secondly, you seem to have missed the “search and surf” features of Lijit: Your network isn’t there just to point out cool new stuff, but also there when you are searching or surfing. E.g. when I search for “art dolls” in Google, I instantly see that Brad Feld has tagged a relevant page in delicious, plus I see additional results, but all from the perspective of my network. See the screenshot: http://wanderingstan.com/googbrad.png

And lastly, the twist that Lijit puts on discovery (Digg, Reddit, etc…) is not the negative ratings, but rather the social network aspect. In Lijit, not every “vote” is created equal. Votes from people closer to you in your network hold more weight than others. This allows each users Lijit List to morph into a personalized Digg. For example, there will never be a front page Digg article about knitting. But in Lijit, if some of your friends (or a lot of friends-of-friends) are knitters, then you’ll get some knitting articles. Same goes for any topics that wouldn’t be of interest to Digg’s center-of-mass. I think this is a much more powerful approach than a one-size-fits-all Digg or Reddit.

We just launched a month ago, so we have a lot of rough edges to work through. It’s clear we need to communicate our value better. But I hope you’ll give Lijit a deeper look, and please feel free to contact me. Lijit (and its previous incarnation, Outfoxed) have been been the center of my studies and my work for the last two years, so I’m always happy to talk about it. (And some of my friends wish I’d shut up about it…

-stan

I’ve emailed Steve and I hope he’ll accept my offer to talk a little more about Lijit.

Do you really want to share your clickstream and search history with the world? I’m not convinced…yet.

I think it’s like wearing clothes. You don’t reveal all of yourself when you’re out walking around. You control your level of exposure, and you dress yourself up in clothes that express you. Sharing your raw click or search streams is like walking around naked. Some people are into that, but most would rather express themselves through controlled channels like blog posts, social bookmarks, photo uploads and such.

But as Greg pointed out, we are all naked to the servers that we surf.

Fred Wilson has no problem with letting it all hang out. He says “I am not a fan of privacy (clearly). I believe privacy gets in the way of discovery and learning.” He uses RootMarkets’ worm widgets to show his latest page visits and searches in real time. (Shameless self promotion: This is powered by the Attention Recorder Firefox extension, which I authored last fall.)

For myself, I’m going to keep a tighter reign on my revelations. But then, who would have imagined how willing people would be to share so much of themselves on MySpace? Maybe I’m just being old? I’ll have to think harder about this.