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Welcome to money 57,
subject Search, puppy love and money
Search, puppy love and money One outfit wants to make bucks off our quest for contacts. But is it fun? April 14, 2005: 11:13 AM EDT There she was, just like I remembered her. Sure, 29 years older, but she had that same smile. And the same curly, blonde hairstyle. I'd spent many an algebra class staring at that hair. And now, thanks to the Internet, I was staring at it again. So I Googled. I found a few biographies, but oddly enough none mentioned what junior high school she attended. Then I found a picture of her giving a speech at the previous year's conference. Sigh. Junior high school crush reborn ... virtually. I'm not alone (No, I'm not talking about the crush thing). Lots of people look up other people on the Internet. And we're not just talking old girlfriends and drinking buddies either. Job applicants and other blind dates get looked up too. If you look at it in the broadest sense, it seems to be a very, very common activity, said Jim Jansen, a professor at Pennsylvania State University who has been studying Internet trends. The question is... the question we always have around here ... can you make money off it? An outfit called Ziggs.com is trying. It's essentially a database of profiles, mainly company bios scraped off the Net, but you can custom make one too. The site is ostensibly designed to help people make professional or business connections. Makes sense. There's already enough dating sites out there. You can use a professional profile for a professional connection or a personal connection, but you can't use a personal profile for a professional connection, said Ziggs CEO Tim DeMello. You don't use your Match.com account for business. Ziggs makes money by connecting names or company rosters listed in its database with various searches on Google and Yahoo. For example, if you are a chickenhawk expert in Topeka, for $50 a year you can have your name pop up on the big engines if someone types in chickenhawk expert in Topeka. On a basic level, it's the contextual search model using people instead of products. Business has been so good, said DeMello, now that the site now lets people maintain custom profiles for free (it used to be you got charged $25 after the first year). But it's not yet cash-flow positive -- that's over a year away, said DeMello. And at a little over 2 million profiles, Ziggs.com is still a tiny place in the 150 million Internet user universe. DeMello believes 10 million will be the site's tipping point into the Internet big leagues. According to comScore Media Metrix, that's just under where the ubiquitous Classmates sites are now. At its current growth rate, he expects it to be there in about two years. That assumes, of course, one of the big boys (i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) doesn't decide it wants to jostle Ziggs for some of its action. For you money-hungry types who want to relive the 1990s and throw money into a fledgling Internet venture, give up. It's privately held. But if you are interested in looking up an expert or two, it's not bad. It would have been useful to me a couple of weeks ago, when I needed a goldfish expert. However, it didn't bring up the one I found through good old reporter asking around. And it doesn't bring up some of the juicy stuff you really like to know about people. On Ziggs, you get a nice, sterile, profile. On Google, you may get some dirt, or at least insults. Google me, for example, and you get treated to all the blogs that think I'm an idiot. Yeah, there's a place for people search. Not sure anyone has the right combination yet. But at least you can get a glimpse of old heart throbs from time to time. Why was the Chevy place empty? __________________________________________ Allen Wastler is Managing Editor of CNN/Money and appears on CNN's In the Money. He can be e-mailed at wastlerswanderings@cnn.com.
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