Kinja is the Nick Denton project from early 2004 that, paraphrased from his own words, didn’t quite make it. It lags behind the other Gawker properties by a hefty amount of traffic and just never got off the ground the way Nick, Meg or the web industry envisioned it would. Denton felt it was a flop, but in many ways its business goals and technology were far ahead of its time. If Kinja were launched/re-launched now it would need to compete with the likes of Bloglines, My Yahoo!, My Web 2.0, Delicious (okay, so all of Yahoo!) and a host of other “web 2.0” aggregators and homepages. Here are some key elements that, if executed properly, might make Kinja mighty again.
Technology
Squidoo Says My Lens Needs Improving
I was a beta tester for Squidoo early on, and honestly, I still have no clue about what it does. People can run their own weblogs, so why write on Squidoo? People want to determine their own content types, so why only stick to the “modules” Squidoo provides? I don’t get it, but maybe lots of other people do and I’m in the minority. Either way, I got this funny email from the Squidoo beta team just this morning and I thought I’d republish it to see if you guys got the same kick out of it:
No Firewire On Intel iBooks???
Mr. Jason O’Grady is reporting at ZDNet that the rumored Intel iBooks coming in January will not have Firewire (IEEE-1394) inputs, continuing a trend started with iPods dropping Firewire for USB 2.0. Wow, let’s hope this can’t be true, because…
Web 2.0 Scalability In The Bullseye
Jeremy Wright posted an entry the other day titled, “Web 2.0 Companies Need To Scale” where he talked about how infrastructure scalability is sometimes not written into the plans of new “web 2.0” companies and I agree. He then continues to talk about how executives at companies want 3 or 5 9’s of uptime (99.999% uptime) but aren’t willing, or aren’t aware of, the massive cost at each step of the way. I thought his article definitely needed to be written, and kudos goes out to Jeremy for having the foresight and cojones to actually write it! Oddly though, that article has been under fire for a day or so now and I think some of what Jeremy is saying has been misinterpreted.