Jared Kim’s Weblog

Hey all,

The Associated Press wrote an article about Stalkerati and social networks earlier this week and it had a lot of quotes from me. It got syndicated to places like NY Times, USA Today, BusinessWeek, and many many others. I’ve been getting a ton of e-mail regarding Stalkerati, so I just want to write a blog post that answers a few common questions.

• Stalkerati was a fun project that I made last year in May 2006. I pretty much stopped working on it by the end of June 2006 because I could not do searches on MySpace or Facebook after they implemented certain changes to their respective sites. However, even though I stopped working on Stalkerati in May 2006, I would still get sporadic interview requests from reporters every 1-2 months.

• Yes, I could have written a web crawler/spider to make it work on MySpace and Facebook, but I felt like it wasn’t really worth it. I don’t believe you can build a company that piggyback’s on another company’s data unless their is a formal way of doing it via an API or something. However, I consider Widgets & slideshow services a total different thing due to the fact they are not relying on user data that belongs to other companies. Therefore, they still have a stable market (unless MySpace wants to block them).
• I am no longer actively working on Stalkerati as of June 2006 (wow its been a year:). In January of 2007 I launched Yaqqer.com while in my freshmen year of college at UC Berkeley. In March 2007, I left UC Berkeley to start my 3rd company. I can’t say too much about what my newest company is going to do, but I can tell you that if you play video games on your PC, you’re going to (hopefully) like it a lot I have some awesome and experienced people working with me on this one, so I’m pretty excited.
• Yea, I know Stalkerati doesn’t work on Safari. If I remember correctly, it’s because Stalkerati uses the onLoad event on its iframes, and Safari does not support that event.

Hopefully that answers some questions. If you still have questions or just want to say hi, you can use the contact form on my About page.

Just had my interview with TheCulturalConnect go live yesterday. Check it out!

Just watched Jawed Karim’s talk on YouTube at UofI . Most of the video is about social media and web 2.0 in general, nothing new for most geeks & entrepreneurs out there.

However, it gets pretty interesting towards middle/end when he starts talking about YouTube’s early founding -> today.

He showed one video where the three founders were sitting around and talking about how they thoughtYouTube sucked about 3-4 months after they launched. Even the best have their lows.

Update 10/27: Looks like this is open to everyone now.

Facebook just launched this new ‘Share’ feature. Seems like it’s competing with delicious and is only open to users in the Stanford & Berkeley networks. Here are some screenshots:

I just got this announcement on my facebook:

More Privacy Controls

Last week we asked you guys what privacy controls you thought were necessary for the upcoming expansion. We read all of your suggestions and we have built these controls:

• Hide yourself from all people in a type of network (e.g. people only in a region, high schoolers) in searches.
• Prevent people in those networks from messaging, poking and adding you as a friend.
• Control whether your picture shows up in your search listing.

These controls are all under the Search section of the My Privacy page. As always, please send us feedback here.

These features make me think they’re gearing up to go public soon. In the future, if a college student only wants to be seen by other college students, he/she can set that in the privacy options. Therefore, his/her overall collegiate Facebook experience will stay the same.. hopefully.

In other news: I’m in my 3rd/4th week of college and life has been busy.

The US version of Cyworld is up. Congrats to the team out here in SF. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out…