Well, not really - but it might as well be. Squidoo is Seth Godin’s web 2.0 redheaded stepchild. It’s a user-generated experiment gone bad. The basic premise is that anyone can create a “lens” and become a “lensmaster” of a page about anything they want or are passionate about.

But lately the only time I hear Squidoo mentioned is when somebody talks about parasite SEO or ways to get easy trusted one-way links. About five months back Techcrunch blasted Squidoo. There are just so many problems with the Squidoo concept once reality sets in. Here’s a few notable ones:

1. Most non-seo’s probably build a page and never come back to it. There is just nothing to come back for. The site is 0% sticky.
2. Once someone claims a lens it’s theirs. This means there’s a crapload of really empty pages that will just stay that way because of point #1 and nobody will fix them. It’s like wikipedia without the wiki or the pedia.
3. The whole payment/revenue-share concept is ridiculousy complicated and confusing - how the money splits before and after expenses, what those expenses are, how much of it goes to charity and under what circumstances, etc. They even have trouble explaining it themselves.
4. The children in a Bangladeshi sweatshop earn more than the top Squidoo lensmasters. The highest payouts (if you work really hard and promote it) go all the way up into the low 2 figures range. Cha ching!
5. Even their best content (Top 100) is utterly useless and complete crap. I sure hope the Magic of Harry Wong makes it into the top 10 to overtake Chocolate Obsessions. (Did John Mark Karr shadowrite the “Wong” lens?) I’ve seen content on scraper sites that puts Squidoo content to shame.
6. Visually the whole site looks like a bunch of IRS agents decided to create their own Friendster, but with instead of writing, they scraped a bunch of articles from a network of grandma blogs. The visuals on the site are really bland and the users have no control over layout or style.

So I went ahead and created a new lens called Spamdoo. Do me a favor and go give it 5 stars. I want to see just how easy it is to move up the “most popular” rank. This is assuming the editors don’t get offended and remove it before you read this.

Last year an early-20-something couple came to my door promoting the Sierra Club. I signed up, but only because 1. they were not smelly hippies as I would have imagined 2. I felt sorry for their door-to-door hustling ways in the hot Florida sun, and 3. I kind of like nature.

My membership card in hand, I felt like a responsible citizen of the world.

In the coming months, however, I started receiving Sierra Club magazines and other literature, which I found REALLY ironic - preaching a message via dead trees - the very thing they are trying to protect. This had bothered me for quite some time - I NEVER read crap I get in the mail and I always hate seeing so much paper get wasted - I recycle, but I know not everyone does. Besides, recycling is still not as good as “never using the damn tree to begin with”.

A few months ago the Sierra people started calling my cell phone. I never really wanted to talk to them so I always got off the phone pretty fast. But after a number of tries I got pretty fed up with them trying to get me to donate. I told them to take me off every one of their lists, including the mailing list.

I may have stuck around longer, but I really get the feeling the a lot of money donated to the Sierra Club goes towards supporting the machine that is the Sierra Club. If anyone knows of a site with stats of “how much of your money actually goes to help and how much goes to administrative expenses”, please drop me a link in the comments.

Sorry Sierra Club. You just lost a member.

I’m going to go ahead and make some predictions. I may end up being wrong (not the first time), but this is how I see events unfolding: both Microsoft’s Zune and Playstation’s PS3 will be significant market failures.

There has been a lot of hype around Zune. I think some people will buy them but Apple will remain the leader. This won’t sit well with Microsoft who will keep losing market share in the personal computing market as well. The Zune will be a large waste of their time and money.

Sony’s beleagured PS3 will probably be delayed once more, and will fizzle as it comes out into the market. It will be too expensive, too unreliable, ahead of its time. I believe they tried to do too much and will overstep the market. Nintendo will make a surprising upsurge and take away a lot of the video game market with their new console and portable. Microsoft and Xbox will have a pretty good holiday season, but the real surprise will be Nintendo.

One of our startups, Qeeglixtr™ is looking for VC funding – anywhere from $15M to $145M, please. We predict the market cap will be $8.75 Billion within 8 months, so this is actually a good deal, but you have to act now.

It’s a little hard to understand what Qeeglixtr™ will do but let me try to explain it: It is a beta SMS feed widget that uses a wiki-backend to collaboratively publish ajax-enabled API’s to semantically tag and integrate tagclouds in user-generated blogs, and podcasts that asynchronously posts skype messages back the user.

In short, you can use it to send a trackback to your grandma’s mobile blog anytime somebody on Facebook finds out you bought an x-rated amazon untube video. It will then let grandma send you an interactive-zwinky via skype that will then be tagged and mashed up with your last.fm tracks to appear on your half-life account as a youtube clip that you can then share with your friends.

It’s that simple. Pretty soon people will be saying, “remember the days before Qeeglixtr™ when we used to have to talk to people? That sucked. Grandma just pwned me.”

You can use Google to predict the demand ⁽¹⁾. There are 131,000 searches for “zwinky”, 600,000,000 searches for “SMS”, and 17,500,000 for Skype. Concordidly, 131,000 X 600,000,000 X 17,500,000 is something like 3.79 million billion dollars. Estimating that each user is worth $25, that equals … let’s just say a lot of money.

So any takers?

(1) Courtesy of Ali G’s ice cream glove mathematic theory

Thanks to Alex for the logo, and EB ventures for help with drafting the business plan. Also, our competitors who got covered in TechCrunch earlier today:

MSN (excuse me, Windows Live. Oh wait, no, it’s actually MSN) launched MSN Soapbox today. It’s another me-too attempt to enter into yet another saturated market by the slow and badly-lead team at Microsoft. This is MSN’s foray into video services. Competitors are plentiful in this arena - YouTube, Google Video, MySpace Video, Metacafe, etc. - so they’re going to have a really hard time breaking into this market.

The MSN branding is a bit strange since they’ve been moving everything to the “Windows Live” brand as of late.

MS is up to its old bag of tricks by using its own Windows Media format, as opposed to the more popular (and much better, IMHO) Flash video format. I’m just baffled by this whole thing - am I missing something? How do they expect to compete or make any waves with this? It seems like a substandard product launched in a hyper-competitive space, plagued by a proprietary format, and pushed by a company with an increasingly worsening online brand identity problem.