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Well following my recent post about nepotism and ezboard, it seems I’ve struck a nerve: if you go and take a look at the page which features ezboard’s Board of Directors, you’ll see that for some reason they’ve decided to hide it!

What do they have to hide?

Either that or their usual IT skills are showing again…

I’m quite a fan of the TV Show “The Sopranos” which is about a mob family. In a recent episode, a guy is trying to sell the family refuse business and he wonders why an Anthony Soprano is the second-highest paid member of staff when he doesn’t recall seeing him at the office. Being such a family-oriented ‘business’, various family members are also similarly positioned in the companies they look after.

It reminded me of venture capitalists: often in return for the funding you need as a startup, they’ll not only require a piece of the business, but they’ll also put one or more of their people onto the Board. Do you see why it reminds me of “The Sopranos”?

A friend of mine is currently on his second start-up, having acrimoniously split from his first company due to problems working with the rest of his VC-formed Board. He and his other co-founder left and set up a new firm in the same area of business which is now doing well - he has a much more savvy approach to investors now…

Let’s look at ezboard, Inc. and its VC partners, Labrador Ventures.

Labrador have quite an impressive investment portfolio - let’s look at one of them, Soligence, which provides, as I understand it, solutions to help people cut their cellular telephone expenditure. It’s all a bit tech-y for me! Anyway, look at the management team and they’re all tech-heads. Look at their Board of Directors and you’ll see that the first two names are Larry Kubal and Nina Ebert, both from Labrador: the former being a managing partner and the latter being their Chief Financial Officer. Nina Ebert was formerly CFO with Nice Ventures and was also at Saints Ventures where she was a Managing Director and CFO. Labrador Ventures refers to her as Nina Ebert Labatt.

If you look at ezboard, Inc.’s claimed Board of Directors, the first name is Sean Foote. What that page doesn’t tell you is that Sean Foote is also with Labrador Ventures.

But what of Robert Labatt himself? He’s ezboard, Inc.’s CEO but doesn’t appear to be otherwise connected to his wife’s firm - maybe him joining ezboard as its boss at the same time as Mrs. Labatt’s VC firm arranged a few million dollars of financing is a complete coincedence? He started up a firm called IDEA, Inc. which seems to have disappeared, or at least I can’t find any information about it; and let’s not forget Robert Labatt is all about promotion and marketing. When he left Gartner - where he apparently sat around and thought a lot (he is quoted as providing “thought leadership” there), didn’t he turn up at Saints Ventures - where she was MD and CFO - as some sort of “entrepreneur in residence”?

So it appears that the driving force for this “problem solving kinda guy” may not be Rob himself, but Nina: he leaves Gartner, spends some time working for his wife or at least working with his wife’s company. She moves company and then he’s installed at one of her new company’s investments. Must be nice to have these new positions handed to you… Mind you, I wouldn’t want to suggest there was any kind of nepotism at work here.

Oh and you know how Rob likes his running (see the DEMOfall presentation)? It seems she’s better than him at that too having beaten him at the Run to the Far Side 5k!

Oh dear!

Maybe YukuHelp should “ask friends and community members … send a PM, send feedback, use contact to get in touch” or submit a help ticket…

In that same thread, one of the Yuku Help [sic] Forum moderators - whose job must surely be over now - claims the Yuku Help Wiki is a “more efficiant [sic]” system:

“One of the most requested things for yuku is FAQs, and these are being built at the same time as the system is built.”

Ah! So the Yuku FAQs then (which are well out of date) are in addition to the, er, Yuku FAQs in the Help Wiki? Maybe they should have an FAQ FAQ? You couldn’t make this up, could you?

…is the stifling of criticism.

Yes, at the close of business on 21^st September their supposed Help Forum [sic] will be shut down and a redirection put in place to a new Help Wiki system. Users seeking help will have to file a ticket that will no doubt take days to be answered.

Requests for features? Gone, no doubt. Beta testing feedback? “No thanks”, apparently. Criticism? No, no place for that on Yuku now: after all, ezboard, Inc. needs to start getting those advertising bucks rolling in and critical comment is probably A Bad Thing as far as that goes…

http://help.yuku.com/forum/viewtopic/id/3497

Yes, today is Yuku’s first birthday!

It was launched on this date at DEMOfall 2005 a year ago as being “available today”. Watch the presentation from ezboard, Inc.’s CEO, Robert Labatt. Listen to how he mentions that Yuku is “better than free”, that an “average large board” can make $3-$5,000 per month from being on Yuku and then hear how he differentiates Yuku from the other products in the marketplace: sharing advertising revenues with board owners, backing up the boards on a regular basis and actively promoting those boards.

Then go and have a listen to the podcast he made at DEMOfall. Listen how he says that what’s wrong with blogging is people leaving Spam as comments and how by enabling other people to blog communally, Yuku is somehow different - I can’t see how letting people comment on a Yuku board will somehow prevent Spam, but there you go. Again he seeks to differentiate Yuku from other products by saying that you can make money from being on Yuku as it’s “better than free” in that they share advertising revenue with board owners and here he also says that board owners can make money from paid subscriptions to parts of their boards too.

So let’s see where this product, “available today” a year ago today, is now.

Backups? {hollow laugh} No, that’s not available to board owners yet and we know from our bitter experiences how farcical the supposed ezboard backups were:

“Weekly backups and free restores protect your board”

Yeah, right….

Promotion? Er, no…

Sharing Revenue from Advertising and Subscriptions? No. Not even a peep out of ezboard on that element since DEMOfall.

“Available Today”? Well, it’s still in beta. A miniscule fraction of ezboard’s message boards have transferred across on a trial basis as guinea pigs for the board migration. Just another half a million or so claimed boards to go then…

And just like many one year olds, its proud parents can’t see any failings. It’s still crawling rather than running fast. It’s a big financial burden on its parents as it doesn’t contribute to the family economy but just costs them money. And it really does appear to be full of crap! The ezboard staff all think that their baby will show great promise too: how many times have we seen them write that Yuku will be great when it’s mature?

Oh and one last thing: according to the press release that ezboard, Inc. prepared:

“At DEMOfall 2005 ezboard, Inc. (station #18), the largest independent online community network, today transformed online communications with the launch of Yuku, the world’s first, free community blogging platform.  Community blogging is the next generation of online communication and with Yuku, people can bond together in a shared, collaborative environment. Bloggers and community leaders may also generate revenue from their online activities.”

And as usual, Robert Labatt’s direct quote is somewhat telling in terms of what he said then and what we know the true position to be:

“‘Yuku goes one step further than free by sharing revenues from targeted advertising and premium content subscriptions,’ continued Labatt.  ‘With Yuku, community leaders can focus on growing their communities using the integrated promotion tools.  In turn, Yuku supports them by selling targeted advertising.’
“Yuku is currently available.” [emphasis added]

Note carefully the use of present tense there.

A number of so-called Web 2.0 sites use what are known as “tags” to allow mainly collaborative sites to classify or organise articles, although I prefer to have a ‘proper’ search mechanism in place and hardly every use tags on my own blogs, given they are generally categorised or classified into major subjects and have a search function anyway.

Nonetheless, my Movable Type blog and LiveJournal have this facility with words or phrases being allowable as tags.

Per Movable Type:

“Tagging is a popular method of classifying and organizing entries. Tags are simple, comma separated words or phrases that you attach to an item which describe particular facets of it. Tags provide extra metadata that can be used later to find a particular entry or other entries like it within the system. Tags are most effective when they are very specific. This specificity is gained through the use of tag combinations, which essentially form “tag intersections.” Tags can optionally be displayed on the published weblog where readers can click on them to find other entries that are similarly tagged.”

Per LiveJournal:

“Tags are words and short phrases used to organise your journal entries.”

So I can see how a decent tagging system using phrases might be useful. Guess what? Yes, Yuku has tags! Kudos to them

Except there’s a catch. Didn’t you know there would be? Here’s an extract from the Yuku tags FAQ by Michelle:

“It is up to users to create meaningful tags though.”

I couldn’t agree more.

So, if a user was interested in the US TV Show “American Idol“, for instance, and wanted to tag their post accordingly, then that’s the tag they’d use, right?

Wrong! Michelle has looked at the Yuku implementation before stating categorically that:

“Tags are meant to be single word entities.”

Michelle, you missed the bit where you should have said:

“Our implementation only allows single word entities, unlike all the other sites using words or phrases.”

So you can use the terms ‘American’ and ‘Idol’ which won’t really aid a visitor or you can use a specially made up word of ‘AmericanIdol’. Let’s hope the users are seasoned Yuku veterans, eh?

Maybe Reg was too busy playing Wikipedia Edit Tag to code it properly…

I’ve been doing some editing over on Wikipedia since February this year. I started doing some edits to the existing ezboard entry firstly to remove the unsubstantiated bits and bobs and then to remove the advertising spin being applied to it by various ezboard staff and one user in particular calling himself “Regimemachine“.

I then realised that Yuku didn’t have its own entry, so I started one off. So conscious was I that it had to be unbiased and verifiable, that once I’d posted the original version another user wrote:

“Is this Spam? Looks like spam.”

But that was not to be the case, with the usual suspects trying to turn it into some form of advertisement for Yuku complete with unsubstantiated claims for user numbers and the like.

Now, bear in mind that Wikipedia states:

“Wikipedia is not an advertising service. Promotional articles about yourself, your friends, your company or products; or articles written as part of a marketing or promotional campaign, may be deleted in accordance with our deletion policies. For more information, see Wikipedia:Spam.”

and

“Encyclopedic content must be verifiable.”

you’d think that ezboard, Inc. wouldn’t have anything to complain about. But this is ezboard, so their employee writes amongst other things:

“See the discussion page. Every other software lists features. We have the right to do the same.) “

Er, no, you don’t, actually. If ezboard felt that other software entries were biased or advertising, they should dispute those articles’ contents. But no, instead of that, they decide to complain about me and claim I’m being biased.

“Regimemachine” - or “Reg” as I’ll call him from now on - seems upset that I’ve been using his made-up surname ’James’ as I’d wrongly assumed that the name he uses on Yuku and elsewhere (”Brian James”) might be his real name, but it’s not. Maybe he has something to hide?

He’s then used the mighty power of the Internet (or Google…) to try to dig a little deeper about me and then proudly spouts some more inaccurate information he’s managed to come up with. Ah well.

I am clearly - in his eyes at least - a nasty piece of work, unlike himself. After all, he’s a thoroughly nice chap, I’m sure. And the following hyperlinks are clearly misleading and inaccurate:

http://www.last.fm/user/regimemachine/ - which shows his “made-up” name of Brian James and a domain name he uses…

http://www.regimemachine.com/ - a domain name that’s registered so as to hide the identity of the registrant (much like http://www.ezboardsucks.com). Not much to see there … now. Instead, try seeing what used to be there.

http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:www.regimemachine.com - take a look at Google’s cached copies of some of the content that was there. Oh dear! That must all be mistake, surely? Well it appears he too is on Technorati.

http://technorati.com/profile/regimemachine - oh dear, oh dear! Surely that “regimemachine” can’t be our Reg? OK, so he too calls himself Brian James, but that must be coincedental? He lays claim to three blogs there: regimemachine.com, fuckthisporn.com and stopliving.com. I wouldn’t click through to stopliving.com if I were you unless you want to see some somewhat dodgy photographs…

Mind you, given the extent to which ezboard read this blog and act to try to hide what I mention here, I doubt it’ll be long before those sites and links either disappear or have the content replaced with fluffy kittens.

A favourite game being played these days seems to involve making up numbers. Some examples?

Well how about the Yuku/ezboard DEMOfall 2005 presentation, which states that (as at September 2005):

“…Yuku has more than 14 million registered users and 500,000 communities. Yuku is growing by more than 200,000 registered users and 6,000 communities a month….”

Except at that stage, despite them saying that Yuku was “available today”, it was a closed beta (or really, closed alpha) and had but a very small number of users, certainly far less than the 14,000,000 users claimed. Note also that Yuku was claimed to be growing at 200,000+ users a month at that time, not just getting 200,000 new users and losing a few - growing. Wow! So by now, they’d have, what, another 2,400,000 users, wouldn’t they, totalling 16,400,000?

Hmm. Maybe not. Anyone remember this post by the Yuku Blogger himself, Mr. Rob “proudly powered by WordPress” Labatt on 29 June 2006:

“I’d like to thank the over 25,000 ezboarders who have gone to Yuku!”

Ah. So not quite the 14,000,000 Yuku registered users he’d claimed back in September the year before?

Still, 25,000 ezboard users now on Yuku is still an achievement. How many? Ah, well according to the Yuku Wikipedia entry so carefully written by ezboard staffer, Regimemachine (aka Brian James), that might be “factually inaccurate” too:

“As of September 1, 2006, internal stats show that almost 15,000 [1] members of the ezboard community have voluntarily begun beta testing the Yuku product.”

Go on! Follow the link in there to Yuku’s Developer Blog, where he states on 7 September 2006 that:

“First off, I’d like to mention that Yuku has recieved almost 15,000 user imports from our ezboard users. That’s huge and I’d like to thank everyone for trying out Yuku and for all of your input.”

Excellent stuff, but, er, isn’t 15,000 less than 1% of the claimed ezboard userbase? And isn’t 15,000 somewhat less than the 25,000 his boss had claimed were on board less than two months previously?

Surely ezboard, Inc. wouldn’t release completely inaccurate or inflated user figures for some unknown reason? Would they?

Or so it would seem: some coincedences yesterday, with one of ezboard’s Yuku developers taking time out from his busy schedule to do some substantial promotional editing to the Yuku entry on Wikipedia.

He did the same thing on the same day to the ezboard Wikipedia entry, specifically the bit where it says:

“ezboard, Inc., based in the San Francisco, California, United States, claims to be the largest provider of free hosted Internet forums.”

Without any substantiation, he had changed this to read:

“ezboard, Inc., based in the San Francisco, California, United States, widely known as the largest provider of free hosted Internet forums.”

[emphasis added to both quotes]

Fortunately, another user picked this up and ‘reverted’ the entry.

And spookily enough, on the same day, the Administrator of ezboard’s favourite, the Survivor Sucks board edited their Wikipedia entry to remove the section about the apparent free Gold Trial status and anonymous withdrawl. He does explain why here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Survivor_Sucks

Coincedental, eh?

Good to see that ezboard staff are remaining ‘on-message’ about those other nasty message board systems.

In this thread in the Suggestions forum on Yuku, a user asks back in July if the thread preview feature in vBulletin (whereby hovering your mouse over a thread title in the forum display window provides a snapshot of the first few lines of that thread so you can decide if you want to read the whole thread) could be implemented on Yuku.

Other users then voice their support for it, whilst some ezApologists say they don’t like it.

ezboard’s Michelle then says:

“I don’t like it either as I think it takes away from a board’s natural interaction. If you’ve only just read the first 50 words of a post then chances are pretty good that you might miss the most important thing written right at the very end…
…  Another reason I dislike it…”

And now with version 2.0 of Yuku, a half-hearted attempt at this very feature has been implemented so Michelle now says:

“yes, it seems to be a very short bit of text - not distracting and still doesn’t give away the whole of the thread.”

In other words, Yuku’s chocolate teapot implementation - it doesn’t show enough of a preview to be worthwhile, around a dozen or so - is good because it’s a Yuku feature now!