Monday rant time: As Rafe Needleman writes in Red Herring, "When it comes to advice about Web sites, email from 'xxxfoxylady@hotbot.com' is likely to get ignored. But advice from a friend will cut right through." So, Gazooba's idea is to reward people for recommending sites to their friends, by distributing points (about $.10/visitor) based on the number of people who follow a link you send them. And it's done on a multi-level type of approach, so you also get "points" for your friends' recommendations, and their friends', etc. They even have the classic x5x5x5 table right on their home page -- straight out of the chain-letter/pyramid scheme world.


The thing that hardly needs stated, but I'm going to anyway, since Red Herring fails to, is that if someone's getting a kick-back for recommending something to you, the recommendation kinda looses its cred -- even if it is from a "friend." (This isn't, IMO, the same as including your Amazon associate ID when you link to a book from your web site, as that's something you're writing about anyway, presumably, you're not specifically sending email -- some might consider it spam -- specifically to get this kick-back.) When you add the "multi-level effect" -- i.e., the desire to benefit from other people's efforts, which tends to be a siren call for sleazes of the world, the concept gets even more worthless.


With all the interesting and valuable web offerings just waiting to be created, the fact that anyone is spending their time on such a venture is, well...I guess it's not surprising at all -- there's a lot more worthless things out there. It wouldn't even bear mention if Red Herring hadn't named Gazooba one of the top twenty emerging technology companies for 2000M, which is what set off this rant.


Back to your normally scheduled programming...