In response to "It's not what you know it's Woyano! Nevermind" by Mike Butcher
Hi Mike,
This is Justin Vincent CTO of Woyano.com.
Thanks for reviewing Woyano.com. I enjoyed reading your review which was well written, and although not in our favor, did make me chuckle.
I guess the first thing I wanted to say is that Woyano.com is not publicly launched yet and is still in private beta testing phase. So I was a little surprised to see that there was a real review about us in the marketplace, we certainly weren't ready for that!
(I know you did try to contact us for comment - but you sent your email *after* you had made your review public...)
Anyway, for those who are in a rush I'll start by giving a top line response to the review, and after that I'll get into a little more detail.
Top line response
- We have not done a very good job of communicating what we are about, as a result the reviewer has misunderstood the prime purpose of woyano.com, and has reviewed us from a skewed viewpoint.
- This has been very helpful for us and highlights that we need to do a better job of communicating our core value proposition!
- Our core value proposition is:
- Build your own personal broadcasting empire using our free tools on your woyano.com ( woyano.com/you )
- Generate 100% of the ad revenue while doing so (our business model does NOT rely on Adsense, therefore we do not share Adsense slots you get 100% of the Adsense time slots, including on search pages, and content listings. You can take the money, or give it to charity)
- As well as having your own Woyano, your content is listed on our main site Woyano.com -- Thus we can bring you traffic, revenue, community and readership (because Woyano is a larger community in it's own right)
- We are a very "simple" one stop place for you to publish content of any kind, no matter how large or small. We also enable you to easily syndicate that content, and to earn revenue from it.
By any kind we mean, blog, review, photo, video, etc.
A more detailed response
"It’s not often (surprisingly) that I see a web site and start to lose the will to live, but this might just do it."
Well I certainly hope that you are reading this, and that you are not dead due to visiting Woyano.com ;)
"Woyano.com is a UK-based social networking site where members can post about their own knowledge"
True, and also.. woyano.com enables users to build their own personal broadcasting empire using our free tools. However, this will be more "apparent" the closer we get to full launch (at the moment we have not launched).
The Woyano.com that you see today is a private-beta test environment. We have invited users onto our system to actively participate in the development of our product by submitting feedback and working with us as we develop user requested features.
Feedback is just another content type on Woyano. We are constantly in open dialog with our users. Feedback is also rated just like any other content type, and it helps us to prioritize what we need to do next.
Check out all our feedback here
On that note, our aim is to bring every tiny part of our company ethos and culture in line with the ideals of web 2.0.
This means:
- We promise that our users can actively participate in the development of our product, and make it the product that they really want, because we listen to (and act on) their feedback on a daily basis.
- We promise that we will never have any kind of annoying picture ads, video ads, popups.
- We promise not to censor user content (unless it contravenes law)
- We promise that our tools will always be 100% free, and never lock users in to our system
- Our core aim is to enable our users to benefit in as many ways as possible by using our system and our technology. This includes financially, and also from a community point of view.
- We promise that we will always have a table tennis table in our office, and when we get stressed we will play on it
For a very early example of what it means to have your own Woyano you can look at these two users. One of them is me, and the other is one of our beta-testers.
Of course please note, at the time of writing this our system has only been in existence for 9 days.
( If you would like to be a beta-tester please go here: http://www.woyano.com/signup )
"They can also plug in their own Google AdSense code and earn “100%” of the ad revenue. Of course they can: the AdSense code has nothing to do with Woyano anyway, but I digress."
For a more in-depth discussion of what we mean by 100% please go here
"The site effectively pitches itself as a place where you can find something you want to know, neatly side-stepping the small point that Google, Yahoo! and MSN are waiting in the wings, ready to serve the user - dare I say it? - more effectively."
Once again this highlights the fact that so far we are not pitching ourselves very effectively!
But the real point I want to make about this is that we are NOT in competition with Google or Yahoo. We are in partnership with them! We have no intention of trying to get users to abscond from Google and use our search instead... quite the opposite.
We want people to use Google, and to find useful content on Woyano in the process. It is just another way for users who put content on our system to get traffic, and thus generate revenue, and readership, community etc.
Woyano has been designed from the ground up to be a very easy place for users to input content of any type, no matter how small or how big. But I really want to highlight the SMALL rather than the big.
For example, on Google I often find myself doing a search such as:
"recursive grep unix"
Typically I find myself having to browse through a few links and wading through some hefty text to find exactly what I'm looking for. It's a bit of a pain, considering that I just want to copy and paste the command within a few seconds. Wouldn't it be nice if someone made a page which had absolutely nothing on it except what I was looking for.
After all, all I need to see is:
find . -name '*.txt' -exec grep 'nslookup' {} ; -print
So why should there be anything else on the page?
On Woyano a tech user can quickly enter a lot of knowledge snippets like that. When I'm searching in Google (or Woyano for that matter) I'll be happy if I run into a pithy page like that - rather than long man pages, discussions, and the like.
It benefits the searcher because it's pithy and short. It benefits the contributor because it took about 2 seconds to input and it generates money!
"The site has a sort of bad attempt at a Digg-like structure since as a registered user you can rate any content on the site, and individuals can establish Kudos"
Woyano really isn't anything like Digg. Apart from anything else, woyano.com is a place to input *content*, not links. One of the by-products is users have the ability to rate content... why? because its a useful feature.
When you think about it, this content that you are reading right now is content I posted on my blog on Woyano - a feature that is not available on Digg (or any other social book marking site).
As far as I am aware Digg is not about posting content, it is about rating bookmarks.
For a more detailed discussion of our rating system have a look at this. I think you'll agree it is a different way of dealing with the rating paradigm than the Digg model.
http://www.woyano.com/view/498/How-do-star-ratings-work
"I have to say I am slightly reminded of AllAdvantage.com, the infamous dotcom boom and bust company which paid its members a portion of the advertising revenue generated by their online viewing habits. Its slogan was 'Get Paid to Surf the Web.'"
Wow. I don't know why. I hope that some of the above discussion has changed that.
"Today it is easy, and on a myriad of sites, so I really don’t see where Woyano can go with this model, other than to copy more faithfully AllAdvantage model of having some desktop AdWare"
Well, given our ideals (as described above) it is safe to say we will NEVER develop any kind of adware or spyware of any kind!
So, given that we give our advertising revenue away... you're probably wondering... where do we make our money?
Woyano revenue stream
Our CEO Graeme Foux has been working in the internet with many major brands for the past 15 years.
His idea is for brands to use Woyano as a place to publish their own compelling "Sponsor Content". In return Woyano can help to drive contextual traffic to their content by use of a single "Sponsor Content" link (top right on each Woyano page).
When we say "Sponsor Content" we don't mean blatant advertising. We mean compelling content that has passed Woyano quality control.
For example Ford may have a very interesting article, written by a travel journalist about crossing the Sahara desert in Ford pickup.
We believe that there is a great deal of potential in moving away from hard sell advertising, to soft sell brand awareness drives.
"I really don’t want to be too harsh on Woyano, but please, for pity’s sake, can’t we get a more original take on social media than this?"
Ok, obviously we disagree, and here are some points to bear in mind:
- Woyano is not a released product, and as such is not intended for review
- The review was written 5 days after Woyano's private-beta birth!
- The reviewer contacted us for comment *after* the review was made public
- The reviewer did not understand our core proposition
As I suggested earlier, we'll take the fact that you didn't understand Woyano as an action point to improve the communication on the site.
Hopefully you'll take a look when we're live, and maybe even change your opinion :)
JV
0 Comments