Lim,Marylyn Grace C.

OOA

            In 1995, Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, started a hobby which was an email list to publicize events in San Francisco. Craig Newmark started sending out notices about cool events to his friends. Then, as time passed, more and more people wanted to be added to the list. And the users started calling it “Craig’s List”. The users started suggesting other kinds of things, like jobs or stuff for sale. The craigslist became so popular in just a short time. Both subscribers and the number of postings grew quickly.

Craig Newmark was so surprised because users are starting to use the mailing list for non-event postings. Users demand for more categories so the list of categories grows. Because of popularity, Craig Newmark thought of switching the mailing list into a website and adds categories. Craig Newmark realized that the  site was growing so fast so he decide that he should stop working as a software engineer and work full time running the craigslist. Over time, craigslist became a central network of online communities, featuring free classified advertisements and forums on various topics.

            At first, craigslist was just a side project. Craig Newmark would be doing his contracting work first and get stuff done then he  would take a half hour off to do craigslist then he would get back to work. When craigslist became popular, many venture capitalists want to fund them. At first, he wanted to accept the offer but Craig Newmark basically refuse to take the offer. He refused to take the offer because he had already made enough money to cover the costs. And during that time, they were charging less than 1 percent of the site.

Craig Newmark funded craigslist all by himself. He didn’t even take any outside investment, because they were trying to run a non-profit company and the non-profit entity only took a few loans. So Craig Newmark was able to fund it just by himself all this time. There are also companies who also wanted to buy them but Craig Newmark still didn’t accept the offer.

            At first, Craig Newmark was having trouble in managing things but when he got Jim Buckmaster to be the CEO and him as the customer service rep and founder, everything went smoothly.

            Why did people love craigslist? Why crigslist did become popular? This is because craigslist gives people a voice and a sense of community trust. Other factors to be considered is that craigslist have down-to-earth values, customer service and simplicity. Their site created a culture of trust and fairness to other people. And their site helps the users to get everyday work done easily.

            People’s suggestions and feedback are very important because that’s how your company will grow. Just like what Craig Newmark did when people would suggest things to him, he would then think if that suggestion is what most people would like then he will do it for the sake of the users. Most of the functions that can be found in Craigslist were based on the suggestions from users. People felt that they are being valued by Craigslist so they are loyal to the site that’s why Craigslist become so popular.

Lim,Marylyn Grace C.

OOA

            As we all know, Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite and online community platform. Flickr was just a feature that Caterina Fake thought of. Caterina Fake started Ludicorp with her husband, Stewart Butterfield, and their friend Jason Classon.

            Ludicorp started when Caterina Fake and her husband, Stewart Butterfield came back from their honeymoon. Ludicorp came from the Latin word ludus which means play. So they thought of building a massively multiplayer online game which was called Game Neverending. This game is based around social interactions, players could form groups, instant message each other and there was a social network in it.

            The company’s first product, Game Neverending, is a web-based massively multiplayer online game with real-time interaction. As time passed, they thought of adding a new feature, a chat environment that includes photo sharing. That’s how Flickr was able to surpassed Game Neverending. Flickr was just a service emerged out of tools originally created for Game Neverending. But Caterina Fake and her team thought that Flickr could be something big so they decided to stop the development of Game Neverending and they focus more on a new photo-sharing community site.

            At first, Flickr started off as a feature. It wasn’t a real product. It mas a kind of instant messaging in which users could drag and drop photos onto people’s computer and show the users what are you looking at. In just 8 weeks, they were able to build the feature and presented it at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference. It did have positive reactions from the people but it’s not a compelling product because it was just a feature. The feature was useless unless you are really in it. But more importantly, this feature grew popularity.

It started to get traction when they added the ability to put pictures on a webpage. As Flickr was growing, they tried to do both Flickr and Game Neverending at the same time. It was a tough one because there were only 6 people in the company and that just wasn’t enough resources to do both. There are so many people who signed up to test the Game Neverending but Caterina Fake doesn’t have any choice but to put the game on hold and stop the development because Flickr was growing rapidly.

            One thing that is unique about Flickr is that Flickr was used as a news-update through pictures. This what makes Flickr so popular. These days, people could also upload photos to Flickr without using a computer. If something happens people can take pictures using their cellphones and upload it immediately to Flickr. That’s how the news-update in Flickr runs. There is also a tagging feature so people could find things faster.

            In the business world, sometimes you expected to do something but you ended up doing a different thing. Sometimes what you have planned won’t really happen. Just like what happen to Ludicorp, at first they were developing Game Neverending but they ended up launching Flickr. So you don’t really know what might happen during the development of a product. One more thing about this story is that, there was a female founder. This wasn’t an easy job because some people could criticize the ability of women. And Caterina Fake proved them wrong. There is no difference whether you’re a male or female founder. The important thing is that you have determination and passion for the business.

Lim,Marylyn Grace C.

OOA

            Brewster Kahle was the founder of WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) while he was working at Thinking Machines. In 1993, he left Thinking Machine and focus WAIS Inc. WAIS was one the earliest forms of Internet search software. During the first few years of WAIS, they don’t have any investment at all; even Brewster Kahle himself had no savings so it was self-funding from the start.

            Brewster Kahle got the idea of WAIS when Thinking Machine was trying to figure out “How would make use of a machine that has 15 gigabytes of disk space and would have processors that you could ran at a gigahertz?” after figuring out how to do it, Brewster Kahle prototyped it during his free time. He was doing WAIS while he was in Thinking Machine.

            After Brewster Kahle left Thinking Machines, there were some questions like whether Thinking Machine owned the idea, because first of all Brewster Kahle started WAIS while he was at Thinking Machine. So there might be some ideas that he got from Thinking Machine, that’s why they thought that maybe Thinking Machine owned the idea of WAIS. But Brewster Kahle made sure that all the things that WAIS needed was based on public domain of software that had been produced and it was based on the open source software. So that means that there were no copyrights. Fortunately, they were able to solve the problem.

After 2 years Brewster Kahle sold WAIS to AOL in 1995. After the acquisition, he didn’t leave the company immediately, he tried to work within AOL but it was very difficult.

            After a year, Brewster Kahle left the company and started another company with Bruce Gilliat. This was Alexa Internet or Library of Alexandria. Alexa internet is best known for operating a website that provides information on web traffic to other websites. And also, Brewster Kahle start another company called Internet Archive. So Brewster Kahle started both companies simultaneously.

Interest Archive is a nonprofit organization which aims to maintain an online library and archive of web and multimedia resources. Alexa Internet offers a toolbar that gave the users guidance on where to go next, based on the traffic patterns of its user community. The use of Alexa Internet is that everything that Alexa collected would be donated to the Interest Archive. In 1999, Alexa Internet was acquired by Amazon, and he continues to run the Internet Archive.

            This story tells us that finding a partner is difficult. Finding a partner is like finding the person you want to get married with. To find a good partner, you should have trust on each other, even through hard times you should always help another. Second, in achieving your goal, you should have a plan on how to accomplish it. Just like what Brewster Kahle did, he makes sure that every year there’s some accomplishment on his plans. We just have to strive harder in order to achieve our goals.