Mahalo adds more news aggregation and revamps UI

Mahalo continues to innovate and improve its site.  They have done a lot of things as pointed out in the Mashable post:

http://mashable.com/2008/10/11/mahalo-redesign/

I like their new UI.  The Live Blogging idea is very interesting.  They also moved a little closer to our business model with more news aggregation that is more scalable than human edited news.

Mahalo Adds Social Search Features

Jason Calacanis, the founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, unveiled My Mahalo at SES New York today. His product demo is available here. Mahalo has obviously done a lot of work to integrate there search with social networks and other web 2.0 services…very impressive. The part of the demo that struck me the most was the screen shot of Google.com with Mahalo content injected within the results and on the right side of the results (sans google ads???).

From Search Engine Strategies (full post is here):

Users who have installed the Mahalo toolbar will be asked when they visit another social media site whether or not they’d like to import their content from those sites to Mahalo. Then, when users search on Mahalo, they will be presented with content first from their friends, followed by the most trusted Mahalo users. Mahalo users build trust by recommending links, and by having those links accepted by the Mahalo guides and added to a page.

“We’re not competing with social networks. We see ourselves as the bridge between social networks and search,” Calacanis said. “We’re building a system where people can openly help each other and share.”

The openness and sharing that Mahalo is trying to tap into is amazing…if it works it will be very exciting to watch.  The potential to make it blazingly easy for users to combine web services from different individual sites to improve their web experience is amazing to think about.  There are a lot of great parallels for the sports world…