Back in the late 90s a new television channel dedicated to technology called ZDTV was launched in the United States by Ziff-Davis. When the bubble popped they sold it to Vulcan Ventures at the turn of the century. ZDTV was renamed to TechTV and over the next few years it built an immense following, some might even say cult like. Personalities like John C. Dvorak, Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and many others became household names. In 2004 Comcast purchased TechTV and it turned, for lack of a better phrase, into a steaming pile of shit. The original talent decided to go and do their own thing, knowing full well that they already had a huge fanbase. Leo Laporte started This Week in Tech, which this writer is a tremendous fan of, and Kevin Rose began a new website called Digg and a podcast network called Revision3 which had the goal of recreating many of the original TechTV shows.
Now both Digg and Revision3 have had their peaks and are currently in decline, but that didn’t deter Kevin from trying something new, so he started a Twitter clone called Pownce back in 2007. That failed in less than 12 months. Again, Kevin’s tenacity wasn’t damaged, and today he’s proud to announce Oink for iOS [iTunes link]. The video above explains the service, but the best way to think about it is a public database of people liking things. You can see where the best steak is in a certain city, what people are watching, what people are reading, etc.
The idea is great, and the application looks gorgeous, but this is very much a service that’s difficult to judge because it’s only really useful if everyone is using it. In today’s age of social networking fatigue, are people really going to want to install this and start liking things around their city? What about niche sites that already do a great job at this? Yelp does ratings for food; GDGT, CNET, and a million other sites do ratings for technology; Amazon has ratings on damn near everything, plus they have a business model, which is to sell you stuff; see where I’m going with this?
Would this startup have gotten any attention if it was started by someone other than Kevin Rose? To tell you the truth, we think not.
[Kevin is in the above photo wearing a Firefox shirt, using a black Apple computer]