With spam, online communities and incentives on the web all cropping up frequently these days as hot topics, newcomer Realize Communications Inc hopes to combine all of these to reduce the amount of spam on Usenet newsgroups and therefore improve their quality and appeal to users. It proposes to do this by providing incentives such as airmiles and other types of rewards to encourage Usenet users to rate other people’s messages. The idea of incentives has been tried already by companies such as CyberGold, which provides incentives for simply viewing banner ads (08/14/97). Deja News also hosts Usenet message boards, but doesn’t provide the incentive-based ratings service.
Realize’s founder and president Michael Ginn got the idea for the technology while at Stanford University in the 1980s and incorporated in to his honors thesis. He went on to the Stanford maven Sun Microsystems Inc, where he worked on what he terms predecessors to Java, namely Sparcol and Hy Class, in a team that included Marimba Inc’s chief executive, Kim Polese. A bit of digging among old Sun Java types has revealed that Ginn may be stretching his Java associations a tad. Sparcol, which seems to have been a Fortran development tool for front-ends was developed in the SunPro division away from the Java work, which was then known as Oak and was part of Sun’s then-secret FirstPerson division.
Revisionism aside, Realize is able to utilize the Usenet boards because it is already part of the network of servers that host newsgroup message boards over the NNTP protocol, which currently comprises about 30,000 boards on all sorts of topics. Users of these groups normally frown upon advertising, but Realize relies entirely on ads for its revenues. It has plucked out a subset of the message boards and added a new web front-end. Ginn says he is not concerned that users will object to banner ads, saying it is akin to contextual advertising in publications such as the Wall Street Journal. With the company’s public launch yesterday, it hosts about 50 boards, but Ginn says it is willing to accept all 30,000 eventually, although that seems unlikely to ever happen. Tag lines at the bottom of messages from Realize-hosted boards will advertise the service and the company also has contacted board team leaders about adding them to the Realize service, says Ginn.
Usenet boards are traditionally unmoderated or use a human moderator. Other approaches have been tried, including software filters, but they are generally too crude, while democratic moderation has also been tried, whereby other users give messages a rating out of ten, but it provides no incentive to participate and people don’t like getting low scores, period. Realize employs a different approach whereby readers rate messages as either very appropriate, somewhat appropriate, or not appropriate and in doing so earn what Realize calls Qy (short for quality) points. These can be redeemed for airmiles or donated to charities, or used for product discounts, although the last of those has yet to be finalized. The money for the airmiles and other incentives comes from a percentage of the advertising revenues. For example, users get 0.03 Qy points for rating an existing message; 0.09 for a new one and the same if one of their messages gets a strong positive rating.
Ginn acknowledges that the rating system could be controversial – what if there were two distinct groups of opinion on a board that canceled out each other’s posts – but reckons his years of research in both technology and social psychology have provided a proven methodology. Once the technology has gathered this information about messages, it can be used to filter messages and users into groups. Messages are not filtered out if just one person says they are not appropriate, however, as Ginn says it normally takes a quorum of about six to nine people, depending on the volume on the board. These filtered groups can be used to increase relevance and target advertising, while maintaining user privacy, he says. Ginn says the company filed for three patents more than three years ago, covering the technology, but has not been awarded them yet.
About a year ago Realize signed a deal with Stockmaster Inc to provide message boards on its financial quotes website and similar deals can be expected. The company is talking to various parties but cannot name names. It has also signed up with DoubleClick and although it is not yet selling banners targeted at one group at a time, it will do so soon, says Ginn.
Ginn left Sun to found his own firm, Collaborative Discourse Software for the Internet (CDSI), completed a $290,000 contract with IBM Corp’s Lotus for an internet planning tool for Notes and then began financing and developing the technology and changed the name. The company is funded by the executives and angels, but Ginn declined to say how much has been raised. He says venture capitalists will probably be brought in over time. Ginn is the acting chief executive at the moment and is one month into executing a six month plan, after which a new CEO will probably be brought in to run the company. http://www.realize.com
