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.

I wake up this morning to receive a Fedex package containing my Macbook (pics here). I play with it for an hour or two and go back to sleep.

I wake up again because my sister calls me. "You've been Valleywagged!" I check Valleywag and see the writeup about Stalkerati mentioning my name. Hurray! More press! 

Maybe if I go back to sleep I'll be woken up again by an acquisition offer or something… ;p

Awhile back I was listening to one of Scott Johnson's amazing podcasts. In it he mentioned his startup Ookles would have its blog hosted off-site at a 3rd-party service (currently WordPress.com).

Yesterday, after Stalkerati was dugg and brought to its knees, I truly realized the importance of this strategy. The whole time Stalkerati was down I was still able to keep the several hundred users who visited the blog updated on what was happening.

Thanks Scott! 

Over at the Stalkerati blog I wrote a little round-up about the whole "digg-effect" experience and posted some interesting traffic numbers.

Stalkerati hit the digg frontpage about an hour ago. So far I've gotten over 1.5K uniques in under an hour. I had the server back up for 2-3 mins, but it got hit with another 300+ uniques in that timeframe before it died again. 

Mmm… this brings back some memories.. hahaha