Social Networking: Connections and Reconnections

A current trend in social networking is empowering real-time connections--think Twitter's up-to-the-minute mobile tweet-streams. A startup I'm working with, iPling, helps you connect to others nearby who share your needs and interests at the moment. But there's another side of social networking, reconnecting with people you may have lost touch with. Venerable sites such as Classmates.com have offered that service for years. Now it's getting more sophisticated.
Last weekend I tried out the reconnection angle by creating a group on LinkedIn for colleagues at a former company, GoTo.com. An Idealab spinoff during the dotcom boom, GoTo--based in Pasadena, California--was founded in 1997, went live with a product in 1998, and morphed into Overture Services in October 2001. In 2003 the company was acquired by Yahoo; the name changed again, to Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), and operations moved to Burbank. GoTo was notable for originating the world's first successful pay-for-performance bidded marketplace for search advertising--the product concept Google improved upon when it created AdWords.

The company also gained a bit of notoriety as the object of one-time celebrity stock analyst Henry Blodget's hypocrisy, when he publicly touted it, pumping up the price, while privately disparaging it--an action that eventually attracted securities fraud charges from the SEC.
My first day on the job at GoTo was Monday, March 13, 2000...a date memorable as the first business day after NASDAQ hit its all-time high of 5132.52 on Friday, March 10. In other words, my first day in the internet sector coincided--hopefully in a random rather than correlated way--with the beginning of the bubble bursting. For a few weeks I worked in the helium-headed environment of the bubble days--a time when GoTo still aspired to be a consumer portal rivaling the likes of Yahoo. As 2000 wore on and we began to accept post-bubble realities a new, less costly business model was needed. The biz dev team began talking to large portals about a back-end service to monetize their search traffic. In the fall of 2000 we went live with a partnership with AOL and GoTo v2.0 was born. The new strategy was so successful that we were one of the few dotcom winners in the difficult 2000-2001 period.

As is often the case, competition eventually eroded our success. Google launched its competing cost-per-click version of AdWords in 2002, luring away AOL. Because we were completely dependent on partners for distribution, and therefore for all-important scale, our stock price became quite volatile, shooting up and down as big partners signed or departed. Also, as the partners recognized their critical role, they bargained harder and our margins shrank. Ultimately, acquisition by a large portal that could guarantee a steady traffic stream made good business sense.

In any case, I left GoTo--by then Overture--in February 2002 for a job at Yahoo. When I arrived at GoTo two years earlier, it was in the midst of ramping up after an IPO the previous summer. There were about 250 employees when I joined and close to 1,000 when I left. It was a pretty tight-knit group that had been through highs and lows together and bonded accordingly. When Yahoo bought Overture in 2003 it was a reunion with old colleagues, many of whom I continued to work with until I left Yahoo in 2005.

Recently, with the corporate turmoil at Yahoo, I noticed a number of connections from the GoTo days were reaching out to fellow GoTo "alumni" on LinkedIn. Since I have a special interest in social networking and media, I decided to take the small step of creating a GoTo group. LinkedIn makes it easy to set one up and invite a seed group of members. From there, virality takes over, as friends and friends-of-friends show up in one another's updates and display the group logo. Already, less than two days after inviting the seed group, there are more total group members than initial invitees.

My biggest gripe so far is that I have to hand-approve membership requests from people not on the invite list. I would prefer that people be allowed to join by default, then inappropriate individuals could be removed if needed. However, LinkedIn doesn't offer that feature. One thing's for sure: with hand approval required, LinkedIn gets a lot more pageviews.

By the way, if you worked at GoTo before it was Overture and want to reconnect with old friends, you can join the group here