Updated
Collactive is a new company that lets users mobilize friends and others to get more attention for causes they care about by overwhelming news-ranking sites such as Digg.
Users identify articles or video clips they care about, and then specify what actions they want their friends to take, such as voting for the video or article on Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, YouTube and other news sites. Collactive blasts the request out to the user’s contacts, and makes it easy for them to vote for the story on the news-ranking sites. See screenshot below. There’s a story about it today in the WSJ.
It provides links to the user’s cause “bulletins” so that friends can post it on their Web sites. Collactive, a Delaware-registered company with operations mainly in Israel, is backed by Sequoia Capital’s Israeli office (Update: funding amount is $2 million). The service is free for individuals, but will charge businesses, politicians and some nonprofits for usage. Apparently, it has already been used successfully by the Genocide Intervention Network, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit, to boost visibility about the conflict in Darfur, Sudan.
Notably, it is run by Eran Reshef and Amir Hirsh, the co-founders of Blue Security, a company that developed an innovative anti-spam technique: It would deluge spammers by sending them massive amounts of spam back. While momentarily successful, a Russian based spammer counter-attacked, and brought Blue Security to its knees about a year ago. Ironically, the co-founders have joined the other side, using what they’ve learned to essentially spam news sites under the pretense that is for good causes. Blue Security had been backed by Sequoia’s rival, Benchmark.
4 Comments
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Bill Scannell said:
Hi Matt,
Bill Scannell here: I’m doing some work on behalf of Collactive.
I don’t quite understand why you see what Collactive does as ’spamming’ or overwhelming’ news sites. Public participation is a good thing, no?
Stating an opinion is not spam, it’s democracy.
Our users are real people with real opinions sitting behind real IP addresses. Before Collactive, the only people who had their opinions heard on Web 2.0 sites were a small group of digerati, as well as multinationals who paid to have their voices heard.
The more people that have their voice heard on the Web, the better; and Collactive helps by lowering the barriers to entry in order for ordinary people to do just that.
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Gal Josefsberg said:
Yah, I agree with Bill. This doesn’t sound like spamming. Spamming is unwanted email that wants me to do something I probably shouldn’t. This just sounds like a way to organize people. How is it spamming if you try to mobilize your friends around something you believe deserves attention?
Sites like Digg and Reddit depend on people to point out useful articles. Is it wrong to encourage people to post specific links to those sites as long as you’re being honest about it? I don’t see anything dishonest or disingenuous here.
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Matt Marshall said:
Ok, perhaps you guys are right. Perhaps I’m just a little saddened that it has come to this. The articles on the front page of these news sites will be determined by the most organized camps and interests. At least people know the rules, and there’s an element of fairness about that; that’s how our democracy works after all. So perhaps unavoidable.
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Riordan said:
Okay, so what Collactive does is what Arrington has been doing all along - that is making it easy for a group of people that don’t really care about a topic (the story they are promoting), but do care about a relationship (such as being in TechCrunch’s good graces)to push the story to the top of Digg or Reddit in spite of the fact that the story itself may not really be all that important or interesting.
I agree with Matt, this is gaming the system plain and simple. It is the artificial promotion of an item based upon the desire to get hits or pageviews with little or no regard to the real value of the underlying story.
While Collactive might have been created with the best of intentions (who can fault people wanting to make us more aware of the atrocities in Darfur?), it will end up being used by the same digerati that have been trying to find ways to “force promote” all along.
And if you think that Arrington and TC won’t use this to further advantage think again. You can map the influence that Digg has on page views on a per post per site basis.
Any time you can generate that much additional traffic with a few clicks that get people to Digg something and you know what that equates to in revenue, you are going to do it.
Collactive needs to add meta moderation to the model or it’s the same thing as having a group of 100 people that will Digg anything you want them to any time you ask them to Digg it..
Riordan
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Paul said:
I think the Collactive model is interesting, but I wonder what will happen when the volume of ’causes’ is extremely large? Will we see either a great deal of dilution, or a small number of cause-celebs around paricular people / groups (a lot of the herding you tend to see on Digg etc).
I like the potential of this to drive some pro-active, ‘push’ browsing based on some sort of channel, tag or activity subscription. Tie that into an RSS feed or widget ….
Paul..
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Truemors said:
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