This post includes a new idea by me that’s a digg/del.icio.us hybrid clone for porn. Waleed’s email below in italics. My comments in email as blue text.
Steve,
What do you think of my new Web site, Ziizo?
Unlike del.icio.us, Ziizo is:
- A productivity tool (or a memory support tool), not a news sharing tool. del.icio.us is not a “news sharing tool”, it’s a bookmarking tool. digg is a “news sharing tool”.
- Allows you to save text notes as well as bookmarks. I can add notes to each of my bookmarks. But I understand that your tool lets me add generic notes — like sticky notes in Outlook, or notes in Netvibes (which I use for my notes). I also see you allow me to create To-do’s by tagging things as ‘todo’ — del.icio.us can do that for me as well; in fact, I currently tag everything ‘l8r’ if I want to go back to it sometime. As for to-do’s, I either use Basecamp or Backpack or Netvibe’s little to-do list.
- Focus is on speed and fast access to information. del.icio.us is fast; yes, having your search as ajax might be a millisecond faster.
- Everything is private by default, unless you make it public. thanks for the privacy concern, maybe I should use this for my porn — but otherwise, I don’t care that my bookmarks are public… And you as a business need some network effects to happen, and that’s the beauty of user-generated content — make it public.
- You can customize your home page, drag and drop sections around. I can do this in Netvibes. In del.icio.us there’s not really a need to — well, there could be, if I were looking at my friends as different sections. Actually, does del.icio.us allow me to see all my friends’ latest bookmarks in one screen? If so, I haven’t used it. BTW, del.icio.us’ user network sucks — I have like 2 friends, because I don’t know who my other friends are on their system… hopefully their facebook app can leverage the userbase; of course I’m sure they’d rather tap into their Yahoo userbase, but not everyone I know has a Yahoo user account.
http://www.ziizo.com – 100 beta invites via Invitation Code: techquilashots Sweet! My first exclusive beta invites for my readers!
Thanks, Steve. And keep up the great work at Techquila Shots. I read every post 
Seriously, thank you. I’m glad you like the blog — it’s comments like these that get me pumped to go on my laptop and nail out a post.
Regards,
Waleed
P.S. It doesn’t work on Safari yet. We’re working on that.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be pursuing this if I were you. OK, correction, you haven’t convinced me at all to use this thing. I see it as del.icio.us, nothing stands out to me. I would honestly position it as a del.icio.us copycat and throw it on eBay (or web2.0forsale.com!). I’m sorry to say that, as it looks like you’ve put a lot of work into it. That, or you need to position this thing differently — because all your “features/benefits” are needs I’m satisfying quite fine with del.icio.us, Netvibes, and Backpack.
But going back to using this for bookmarking porn — I know that the porn industry is billions of dollars. What if there was a del.icio.us copycat that was somewhat anonymous — maybe even digg-style. People bookmark/recommend the best on the web, tag it, etc. Maybe this already exists. But lots of money in that industry in terms of ad dollars and affiliate deals — great monetization options.
I don’t recommend writing copycat apps when a leader exists. In this instance, del.icio.us is the clear winner — they have a huge userbase, they are owned/touted by Yahoo, and they are a very useful app. Yes, there could be better features maybe — but maybe you can build something off their API? Now, I will disagree with myself real fast — Evite. I strongly feel someone can possibly overcome Evite if they play their cards right (and if Zach & Jakob of also IAC-owned Vimeo/CollegeHumor don’t get their hands into Evite first, which they were hoping to do last time I spoke to them in March). Evite needs some social networking — I still don’t understand why IAC doesn’t own a social networking site (buy Friendster!!!!).
Thanks for writing in the question. Hopefully what you take away from this, as well as anyone else thinking of throwing their idea/business out to me to evaluate or give advice on is two-fold:
1) You heard this stuff now before spending 100′s of more hours pursuing the same strategy that in my opinion isn’t the way to go; and
2) My website isn’t TechCrunch, so you weren’t just exposed to the entire tech world — my audience is pretty small. So make tweaks (or abandon and put your time into something else) then approach coverage by TechCrunch or other.
Hey reader! Want my advice?