PayPerPost backs out

Mike Arrington posts that the Performancing Metrics deal is off:

It’s not often that a company announces the acquisition of another company and then subsequently walks away from the deal, but PayPerPost isn’t a typical kind of company.

In a post on the PayPerPost blog today, the company said “We…dug into the Metrics platform and regretfully found that it wasn’t what we were looking for right now.” That came just a week after the official announcement of the acquisition.

Generally speaking, responsible companies “dig into” the acquisition target before they announce a deal.

Nick Wilson at Performancing puts a slightly different spin on it:

After much discussion, we’ve decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isnt right for us or our community. It’s regrettable that we should part ways as I still feel that Dan and Ted are stand up guys breaking new ground, but in the end, the deal was just not right for them or us.

On his personal blog (which is wonderfully profane, as are his expletive-ridden podcasts), Nick is a little more candid:

It’s a huge relief not to have to lose Performancing.com.

We’ve made our mistakes, now it’s time to crack on…

Chris Garrett, another guy involved in Performancing – though not a shareholder – gives his view, again seeming relieved that the deal is off:

  • I am pleased because I don’t think the two communities, Performancing members and PPP members, actually overlap or make as good a fit as PPP assumed they would.
  • I’m looking forward to an open source Metrics and I will work on it given time
  • For me the best news is that Performancing.com is staying with Nick. We put a lot of work into building the site and community, with a terrific group of members. The Performancing domain and brand is hopefully still a valuable asset

Good news though, rather than find a new buyer (which might be hard now anyway), Performancing Metrics is being opened up to the community and made open source. Cool.

What form it will take will be unknown for a while, but I reckon a small metrics service that each site hosts for itself would be a good route to go down.

Performancing for Firefox will remain ScribeFire – excellent news, it’s a much better name and can give focus to the blog editor as a project in its own right.

Two things come out of this. One is that not only is PayPerPost a crappy idea for a company, it’s a pretty crappily run place if this mess is anything to go by. Second, the breakdown of this deal will be good in the long term for Performancing, Scribefire and the bloggers who will use the future open-source metrics.

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Google Tips no more

Google have removed their controversial ‘tips’ feature, according to FireFox dude Blake Ross:

Google has removed the tips feature. Perhaps it was always intended as a test; I don’t know the official reason for its removal. In any case, thanks to Matt Cutts and other Googlers who listened and responded to feedback with an open mind, and over the holidays no less.

Nice to know they’re listening.

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Search Wikia Update

One of the earliest posts on hyprtext was about the proposed new community search engine proposed by Jimmy Wales. There was quite a lot of kerfuffle about it, largely due to confusion over Amazon’s involvement, and quite a lot of debate concerning the name of the project, which everyone assumed was wikiasari. Most people agreed that this was a terrible name for a search engine.

Since then, I have had a chance to have a good poke about the site where the engine will be designed, search.wikia.com. The first thing the site does is put right a few misunderstandings:

Amazon has nothing to do with this project. They are a valued investor in Wikia, Inc., but people are really speculating beyond the facts. This search engine project has nothing to do with Amazon’s A9, etc…

This project has also nothing to do with the screenshot TechCrunch are running (which belongs to Wikisearch), and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia…

Wikiasari is not and will not be the name for the free search engine we’re developing. It was the name of a former project.

So, search.wikia is the name of the wiki where the project is discussed. Wikiasari is the name of a previous attempt to get a wiki based search engine going, and WikiSearch is a search engine that searches Wikipedia and all sites that are linked from it.

The new engine as yet has no name. But it’s being talked about.

I have to admit, I’m interested in this project, and I’d like to see it work. So, I have done as Jimbo implores us to do, and joined the mailing list. The first thing to pop into my mailbox was a missive from Jimbo, entitled First steps to getting it right…

…For now I just want to point out that the largest amount of skepticism about what we are going to try to accomplish here is driven by the inherent issue of spammers. There are huge incentives for people to try to abuse our good will and we have to anticipate and expect that. But, unlike many of the skeptics who think that this is impossible, I am very confident that if we can build a genuine community and give ourselves as a community the tools we need, then we can deal with this issue without a lot of trouble.

Tomorrow I will write more about how I see the core design working.

I’m looking forward to it.

links for 2007-01-03