Good idea, terrible execution is spelled mymuv? Who cares!

Mymuv.com (pronounced: my-move, how the hell do you get the u sound from that spelling? ) is the worst company/website name. In fact, although it is barely April, I’ll go out on a limb and proclaim mymuv.com the name-dog of 2007. In ten years when we think back to web 2.0, we’ll laugh at that name. Just like we laughed at 1.0’s non revenue generating billion dollar valued company.

This tragically named company has, at its foundation, a good idea. Harness social opinion on issues of importance to you. Yet they rely too much on creating new social content and opinion from scratch. In essence, the folks over at mymuv.com are (for the moment) mandating new community creation in order to make their site relevant. Great, let me spend more time creating new content for somebody else *sarcasm intended*.

If I were them this is what I might do. Don’t start from the beginning, start from the end.

Why not aggregate collective opinion into a search engine like format. Aside from the fact that their most recent discussions border on banality (at best) they could provide a real service to those wanting to know what (in the aggregate) people think about say Ipod vs. Zen (sorry MS, Zune is dead). Not some dumb-ass star/rating system that can be gamed (digg anyone?). But the absolute aggregated consumer opinions of both Ipod and Zen Mp3 players. Show me a trend line of discussion preferably using sentiment, and let me see some of the major issues that bubble up.

Come on guys, it takes a certain level of creativity to derive “move” into “muv”. Guess you should have spent the creativity capital on the business instead…

;~)

When Wining a World Series Is Not a Priority

I have always been a HUGE fan of the Red Sox. Living in Colorado, I don't get to see many games at Fenway anymore like I did growing up. Needless to say, when they broke the 86 year "curse", I was beside myself with joy. In fact, during the last game of the series, when things looked good (always a relative term for a die hard Red Sox fan) I woke up my kids to witness the event.

My daughter fell back asleep. Didn't care unless the Wiggles were in attendance.

My son, who was too young to walk, was barely awake as I held him in front of the tv to watch the last 3 outs of the game. Given the Red Sox history, this may be the only time he would see them win the World Series in his lifetime! And for the record, I did shed a few tears that night as I danced around the house.  

This morning I ran through my daily ritual of checking my favorite Red Sox blogs: soxaholix, boston dirt dogs, over the monster, etc… I saw a couple of references to this story by Dan Shaughnessy. The synopsis: the Red Sox haven't "gotten around" to re-signing boy wonder Theo Epstein as GM.

For those who have interests outside of baseball, Epstein was responsible for bringing a new approach to locating and retaining talent to the Red Sox. He based decisions primarily on player statistics. Without going into detail, he analyzed many different stats, and variations of stats to determine which combination metrics would best indicate the performance and value of a player. Not an easy accomplishment for a team steeped in traditional baseball management.

So I was shocked to read that after his much publicized departure and renaissance to the team, the Red Sox owner and CEO haven't gotten around to formally signing him up. Hmm, you don't want to sign the guy who brought together the right players and won baseball's top prize for the first time in over three generations.

Just watch, Theo will get fed up and go to the Yankees.

A Slam Dunk Catalyst for iTunes

Everybody reading this knows about iTunes. What a great distribution concept (not only for the content and hardware, but for the reinforcement of the Apple platform/brand) well executed. But there is one thing (at least one thing that currently bothers me) missing that would allow me to buy more music for my iPod: an area to converse w/other iTunes users. And this doesn’t have to be too complex: a wiki would be just great.
No need to build a myspace-like ecosystem. Just support the underlying ecosystem that is already there. How many songs have been downloaded? 100,000,000 million? A billion? I don’t know. But how many people would have downloaded 1 more song if they had known about that artist/song/genre? If only 5% did it, imagine how much it would bring back to Apple (and the artists)?

The Rant: I want to know what else is out there, but don’t want to take the time to go through and find it by myself. Why can’t I tap into the collective knowledge of the iTune econsystem? Other companies are providing an analog to this idea. Pandora allows you to listen to music online and you can provide feedback to their genre learning system. You can even buy the music directly (from iTunes or Amazon).

Come on Apple! Somebody in the product development/marketing group wake up! The more people browse, share and contribute suggestions (if you like X, you’ll love Y and Z) the better it is for all of us.