Prosper, my new favorite game

The internet has always had some great games. Five years ago for me, it was E-bay. Getting in a bid war with some anonymous user who was trying to buy the same niche product that's been discontinued for 40% below the retail cost was always great.

My new game now is Prosper. With Prosper, you offer to loan out a small chunk of money (50 dollar increments) to borrowers who are requesting loans. You get to set the interest rate that you'd like to earn on that chunk. Other people can "bid" lower interest rates.

For the lenders (me), it means investing money and making interest at a higher rate than a money market saving account or even a CD would yield. For the borrowers, it means getting loans at a competitive rate, or for those with bad credit, actually having an opportunity to get a loan, since most banks would be unwilling to lend out the amount that they are requesting.

Since many people all chip in to meet the amount the borrower is requesting, the risk of the borrower defaulting is reduced. If the borrower skips out, at worst you'd lose the minimum of 50 dollars you chipped into that loan.

As I go through the listings, I feel horrible at the situation some people are in. Most are single parents trying to support kids while getting themselves out of debt, others are people who made mistakes and got caught up in the payday loan trap. My mother was the former, fortunately she had friends and family who were willing to loan her money when times were tough, but these people aren't as willing or as fortunate to have that option available to them.

So if you have money to spare and you can sympathize with these situations, toss a couple hundred bucks in prosper and help out some people while making a good yield yourself. You never know, you might actually start enjoying it as a game like me.

Online Amateur Video Future

During the superbowl, there were commercials featured made by amateur filmmakers. Fox took it a step further and created a reality show, On The Lot, which features a bunch of filmmakers and gives them a chance to win production money in order to create their own film.

This is great, but why does it have to be on such a large scale? Sites like Youtube and Livevideo (and others) have users which post content on a regular basis and in episode format. If Fox can dump a million dollars for some no-name filmmaker to create a movie, why can't Youtube pay users to generate content?

There are already sites out there that do this (like Revver). A user uploads content onto their personal page, and then gets paid by the amount of traffic the user helped to generate. (edit: check out this blog for more info)This can be taken a step further though. Got a popular user with a somewhat interesting show? Sign him for thirteen weeks. Make it guaranteed that users who like the show will be checking in weekly.

The potential is great. If advertisers know that a certain page is going to get hit on, let's say, a Monday because the user is going to release the next episode of his show, all of a sudden the user's page becomes inventory that serves premium ads. Imagine signing on an advertiser for thirteen weeks, with a guarantee of a certain number of users.

Of course, sites like Youtube aren't doing lead-in and lead-out videos, so where do you place the ads?

That, unfortunately, is a problem I don't have an answer to.

Google (S)mash!

Colin linked this to me today. http://www.searchmash.com/

It looks pretty plain, but on further investigation (also by Colin), you'll notice that the privacy policy page for the site says it's Google's.

It's pretty interesting. Type in a word to search and you'll get webpage listings, news, blogs, images and even Wikipedia. I haven't played with it much, but it would be interesting if the sections were movable or customizable. It would also be nice if you could add your own websites on the sidebar. Perhaps I'd like search results from Wikipedia, Delicious and Gamespy all listed for me so I can decide which site is most relevant to getting my information.

I'm going to keep my eye on this.

A giant pat on the back

It was announced on Monday that Yahoo! would by the remaining 80% of RightMedia for $680 Million. This is great news for RightMedia and legitimizes everything I've help the company do in the last year (yesterday was my one year mark).

The most annoying thing people have said to me on hearing the news is that Yahoo is trying to catch up to Google. As Lex Luther would say, "WRONG!".

Yahoo! believed in an exchange far longer than Google has. They invested 20% into RightMedia back in October of last year. So really, Google is reacting to Yahoo!. Did Google's purchase help speed things along for a total RM buyout? Sure.

Of course, this might be the ramblings of an employee on the Yahoo! side of the battle, but RightMedia is already doing what DoubleClick is hoping to do. Yahoo! is way ahead of Google in being a part of an Exchange. But then again, I don't know what Google's plans are.

Plus, it's not long before their nickname is officially Double-Goo. What? I think it works.