Mahalo, of Jason Calicanis fame, recently launched as a human-powered search engine. At first blush, its got a limited set of sources. I tested ‘Avocado Soup recipe’ (you know how us Northern Californians need to keep cool in this sweltering heat ;)), but no luck. The concept however has merit as a possible next incarnation of sites such as About.com. I think many will find the human powered, editorialized results, supplemented with Wikipedia results to be a refreshing compliment to Google, Ask, etc. The reviews have been positive and negative but one things is clear: this one will take a lot of time to gestate. Failing a bubble burst, the jury is going to be out for a looong time.

After spending some time on the site one thing is clear: If there were ever a discovery service that was begging for RSS this would be it. Why? Well, since they are going after quality and not just quantity, the rate (frequency) of updates is extremely slow, requiring me to return way too many times to see if theres something new on topics that I care about. I was hoping to set up a few ZapTasks and wait for alerts to come find me. Unfortunately no out bound RSS. They do use RSS very effectively to show related results on a search, but not as a subscription mechanism.

So team Mahalo, I’m sure RSS is on your roadmap, however here are some suggestions where RSS can help you make sure your audience sticks with you whilst you a) grow the content base, b) make your objective for this site a little clearer and 3) turn drive-by’s into trusting subscribers. Give me a feed for the following:

• If I do a search and you don’t have anything for me, let me subscribe to a feed that gives me a heads up when new topics that I’m interested are added.
• Search Results feed
• When a new entry thats related to my search term gets a Shaka, let me know. Since I can register, this should be folded into my profile
• When you deem a new item to be a related search or when the Top 7 change, ping me.

I’m sure theres more but this would keep me subscribed and therefore paying attention to your progress. Dave Winer is more forgiving on this topic but he sticks to this guns.
Happy Zapping, Sameer

technorati tags:Mahalo, RSS, RSS+Discovery, Feeds, ZapTXT, Jason+Calicanis

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.