Techcrush
Otavo
http://www.techcrush.com/2006/11/09/otavo/

Ontario based start-up Otavo appeared in April on Techcrunch, taking a swing at social search, by building micro-communities around Q&A’s. Otavo is a project of serial entrepreneur Amanuel Tewolde.

As press release of Otavo’s blog explains it:

“Otavo’s Intention Engine is poised to redefine searching on the web by allowing its users to simply state what they are looking for instead of typing keywords and sifting through irrelevant results … The search results are generated from information found and shared by people that have had similar intentions. “It is like taking pages and pages of Google results and selecting the best ones and putting them all in one place” said Matt, one of the beta testers. “We call each intention a quest. People join these quests for information and knowledge and are truly enriched by sharing what they find together” said Amanuel founder, and social ambassador of Otavo.” (piling it on a bit, are they?)


To contribute to a quest, users can use a bookmarklet. Otavo then accumulates all generated answers/bookmarks, making them available on their quest-pages and through RSS-feeds. Otavo also includes the whole array of social network goodness, like profile pages, blogs, awards/rankings through a point-system and what-have-you (check out Center Networks for an in-depth round-up) — they spend a lot of time in the past months to hone the user-experience and make Otavo as intuitive as possible.

Otavos business-modell consist of three approaches:

“1. Quest sponsorship. We would feature a client’s information by, adding a text ad, and/or highlighting the URL(s) added to the quest. Requirement is there must be a direct relation of the client to the Quest… meaning it must be useful.

As part of quest sponsorship, we would monitor and notify sponsors of new quests that are related to their products.

2. White Label. Otavo can be customized to be used in a private setting such as a library or for a classroom.

3. Premium Membership. (coming later in ‘07) Uploading and attachment of rich media to quests and ability to archive and attach pages to quests. Ability to create private quests accessible only by invited guests.” (/Message)


According to an interview with Amanuel Tewolde at Marketingmonger, Otavo started out with a high viral spread: 60-70 percent of all private beta-users consumed their allowance of invitations to point their peer-group to Otavo, “the bulk of the users inviting 2 o3 friends”. Nonetheless, Otavo didn’t quite see a comparably exponential growth in traffic throughout the past 6 months, albeit a massive hockey-stick at the end of July, after launching their public beta (according to Alexa).

The field of social search and human filtered, meaningful search-results are an important issue, thus lending players like Otavo more and more weight. Still, I’m afraid that Otavo could easily be overtaken by Yahoo or Amazon — Amazon’s Questville is already on its way and seems to offer a very similar approach, as spare informations seem to predict at the moment (any opinions or informations on Questville, anybody?).

As Stowe Boyd commented on Otavo:

“I am of two minds about Otavo. I am all for collective action and people rallying to help others accomplish their goals, but at the same time I have the sense that some necessary element for Otavo to take off is missing. Absent a simple focus — like Meet-up meetings or 43Places lists — the inherent complexities of rallying folks to help anyone do anything seems a barrier to Otavo success.”

My two pence here would be that Otavo’s relevance and success is heavily depending on either high quality of results or the sheer mass of collective wisdom. Since the mass of the mainstream will usually stay at the center of the web (Yahoo and Amazon, let’s say), Otavo’s niche could be located around special-interest-groups. I’m thinking about the educational and scientific sphere, to which research is a collective, ongoing process. Profiles and ratings (which are being revamped at the moment) could be more specifically designed around those occupations, at the meantime lending more sense to Otavo’s point-system, and nudging it gently towards a real reputation-system (what’s the expertise of people taking part in my quests anyway, as some might ask, or am I just being “quest-spammed” by somebody exploiting Otavo’s system).

Via FeedShow.com