Today, if you search
Google News for Pierre Omidyar, you will get about 232 news story hits.
This eBay founder is 'name-dropped' in articles on everything from
eBay's Bid for global domination to
Cops Quiz £1M eBay Robbers to Social Software Startup
Garners Funding.
The social software company mentioned in this last article is Socialtext
which, according to the Socialtext weblog, just closed a round of Series A
financing that includes a contribution from the Omidyar Network. The eWeek
article, linked above, also mentions that the total Series A funding amount for Socialtext exceeds $500,000—according
to Ross Mayfield.
Kudos to Socialtext—a social software service that I never find down, or slow, or broken while
utilizing the 15+ workspaces that I belong to there. This is markedly different than the experience on one or two other
'social software' related offerings that are 'broken' on occasions too numerous to count!
1. Orkut, Friendster, (and more recently Tribe) get slow as a result of heavy load, which is due to use. The speed of pages coming up are inversely proportional to the number of concurrent users. Friendster recently has seemed to overcome that hurdle, and Orkut seems to just be experiencing it.
So I'd argue that SocialText is fast and working perfectly all the time because not nearly as many users are hitting it.
Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Mike