Day 2: WayBack Machines

The Internet Archive was set up by Brewster Kahle (the internet entrepreneur behind Alexa, sold to Amazon). The term "Wayback Machine" has been enthusiastically adopted by popular culture as mechanism to suggest transporting one's thoughts back to a historical time and place. There is a reason why I mention Brewster Kahle (in day 5 I will talk more about him) and the Wayback machine, bear with me.

Let's go back in time in our own wayback machine (our brain). Let' go back where we started from when we launched in January 2007 (actually 27 December 2006).
Pajamanation was a web 1.0 system where people had to sign in and put jobs on the network. We were going to sell subscriptions to our portal and get money partly from banner advertising. Our engine was based on a taxonomy we built ourselves around microjobs to give people an idea of what microjobs were. These microjobs would be awarded via auctions in a free-market model and every country manager would have his/her own site in native language programmed in Joomla. We thought the assets of our company would be the profiles which we gathered and which we would convert to paying members.

This is 8 months ago and I gradually changed this belief system because I am convinced that it is wrong. Not because I am capricious (which I certainly am).

• Pajamanation should be Free, everything is free in the Gift Economy (subscriptions and banners are web 1.0). We need to have a product we are proud of and we need millions of people that come to that product and enjoy a better life because of it. For this reason it has to be free. How we are going to make money is the subject of the next blog. And I assure you once you have millions of visitors, making money is not so much of a problem.

• Pajamanation should be Miscellaneous: no more categories, we will sort on the way out with datamining analysis and not on the way in (that again is web 1.0). As Weinberger said in his new book (Everything is miscellaneous): Information just does not want to be free, it wants to be miscellaneous. Instead of everything having its place, it is better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously. In other words, everything has its places. Computers store information in different ways than it is presented to us : everything must be metadata.

• Pajamanation needs to have a higher purpose. I have called it the Nash-equilibrium: in short it means, no more auctions. Auctions are crapitalism. People do not like auctions, let's top copying Ebay, skills are not flower pots.  That is why Yosi, Chris and I have slowly repositioned our brand as Entrepreneurship 2.0.  I feel very good about this.  Like so many people, I love to help others and entertain (perhaps) the illusion that what I do matters.  See youtube http://youtube.com/watch?v=j05EpSQzNy8 (English) or http://youtube.com/watch?v=XKV4yqB_Ep4 (Spanish)

• Pajamanation should not focus on profiles. Every one else does that, Facebook, Plaxo, Linkedin, etc.. This is the side of web 2.0 that specializes in relationships. We should be the other side, that specializes in transactions (job engine). Then we can work with all social networks and offer them something that they hunger for: transactions. All these people connected to each other needs something to do.

• Pajamanation is too inflexible. We need simpler country sites that encourage creativeness in the country manager and not confront him with a learning curve that discourages him/her. We need a community-building champion (and I am sure he will object to me using this metaphor), and I have found Andy Roberts (Pajamanation manger of UK) ready to take that task upon his shoulders. Let everyone decide on this process and come up with the ideal country site, simple and adaptable without learning curve. I will ask Andy to write the next blog about this.

Yesterday I tried out two new applications: www.Spock.com and http://Me.dium.com After initial fascination, I was so annoyed that I threw them off my system, they are a nuisance. At first they seemed fantastic because they are interested in all your identities on the web, but then Spock gets confused and you find yourself in an existential phase (which identity am I). Me.dium is even worse, it piggybacks on your browsers and projects you in a universe with kindred spirits which you do not want to meet.

Chris showed me something which is a lot better: frictionless. Pajamanation is going to be an OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID "identity provider", sometimes called an i-broker. Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in; OpenID solves the problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity. OpenID is increasingly gaining adoption among large sites, with organizations like AOL acting as a provider. In addition, integrated OpenID support has been made a high priority in Firefox and Microsoft is working on implementing OpenID 2.0 in Windows Vista.

We will set up our own OpenID server site and you will all be able to try it out soon. Talk to you tomorrow.

Walter De Brouwer