Seth Godin had an interesting piece yesterday morning. He has a toaster that makes toast in 10 steps, which is cumbersome for a toaster. He compared it to ebay, which took him 11 steps to pay them $6. I think Seth missed an important point that he could have made.

We make websites. We as in (presumably) you, and myself. Assumedly, we all do this for a living. This means that most of the day, we’re business people. A wise man once said, “My money is your wallet. I just have to figure out how to get it into mine.” Eleven steps is not going to cut it unless you’re a powerhouse like ebay.

I’d like to point out Apple, yet again. It’s not that I’m a fan, it’s just that they do a lot of things right. You see, I, like everyone else on the internet, have only to fire up pirate bay if I want free music. But almost all of my music is purchased music. If I want a new song I simply pop open iTunes and buy it. It’s on my iPhone in seconds. Apple took one of the most saturated, overdone markets on the planet and figured out a way to get their money out of my wallet… they made it easier for me to spend money.

That’s what it’s all about in business, right? Making money. Making bread… and sometimes toast.

My advice to Seth is this: Throw out that toaster. It reinvented the wheel for no reason whatsoever. Go back to when toasters tosted bread in 2 steps.

Don’t confuse movement for progress, people.

There’s really not much to this article, I just wanted to share a cool link.

The Slickspeed Javascript Selectors Performance Test is a neat little piece of engineering that runs through a bunch of selector tests among multiple frameworks to show how they perform. Simple idea, but a great test of speed.

Ok, so it’s not really breaking news. Let me explain what I’m going at here.

I believe as a service, Mahalo is useless. I’ll provide more information on that later, but I’m here with some evidence that Mahalo is propped up simply by the popularity and shameless promotion of it’s founder, and has nothing to do with it’s own success.

I’m a regular user of popurls.com. They simply display popular RSS feeds from around the net. Making it into the single-story feeds is one belonging to Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo. My disdain for Jason is not based on Mahalo so much as Jason’s character. Personally, I see him as a self absorbed ego maniac who shamelessly promotes himself to the point of raw annoyance. I’m sure on the short term, Jason is a cool guy to hang out with… but being part of the tech community I’m tired of running into his self endorsement antics.

After browsing popurls tonight, I saw yet another Mahalo title endorsement. I decided to do a little quick google research and discovered some annoying information trends.

Mahalo mentions among blogs

So what’s this mean?

While the volume of posts a blog makes are completely relevant (Rev2, for example, doesn’t post nearly as much as Mashable), the sheer number of stories from RWW and TC that mention Mahalo as opposed to the relatively few from Mashable and CenterNetworks indicate a bias toward Calacanis. The fact is, Mahalo simply is not news. It’s a list of links collected by humans. The sites that report real news in the tech community don’t bother mentioning Mahalo as much as the Calacanis-connected organizations simply because Mahalo is not relevant tech news.

Mahalo does nothing interesting

At best, Mahalo is kind of a half-assed wikipedia. It’s not a search engine… it’s more of a human powered directory. It can’t defeat Google because it rides on the back of Google. Every link gathered on Mahalo was found from a real search engine or social bookmarking site. Mahalo has no spiders or automated indexing services. It can never be faster than the search engines because it relies on the search engines for it’s information! And, it can never be more profitable in it’s current situation because the only known route to profit has to do with Google ads showing up on Mahalo pages.

In summary, I’m sick and tired of reading about this acquisition bait. Mahalo’s entire business structure is wasteful in terms of employees and earning money, and as such it can never succeed as a business. If it’s acquired, it adds no value on it’s own and could only, at best, serve to prop up a profitable service. This in itself would destroy the appeal of the site, because it would mean more ads on all of the pages.

So, that’s it. No relevancy. Not real news. Propped up by Calacanis and his buddies as acquisition bait. Time to move on, nothing to see here.