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Source:Valleywag

Is Zooomr, Kris Tate’s Flickr copycat, on the rocks? Tate seems to think so: “I’m working my ass off like you can’t believe in Japan. If Japan doesn’t go anywhere, you can kiss Zooomr good-bye. Americans don’t care about photos like the Japanese — by embracing Japan’s economy, we can save Zooomr financially.” [Zooomr]

Source:Valleywag

Silver-tongued entrepreneur Auren Hoffman was able to extinguish a growing wave of criticism directed at his people-search company Rapleaf with a single blog post. He promised to mend his ways and bring fixes to Rapleaf’s privacy practices. We didn’t have much faith in Rapleaf’s reform– Hoffman’s post was mostly rhetoric, little change. A week later, Hoffman has gone out of his way to prove our doubts by partnering with MerchantCircle. MerchantCircle, of course, is the local merchant directory we’ve criticized before. Of course, Rapleaf and MerchantCircle are in some ways a perfect match.

A directory on its face, MerchantCircle at its root, it is a cynical, poorly-conceived search-engine-optimization play using deceptive techniques to harvest business data. MerchantCircle is notorious for autodialing merchants to build its database. The recorded message tries to dupe merchants into entering their data with the lie that someone has left a bad review. It’s a classic bait-and-switch not unlike Rapleaf’s “someone has searched for you” emails. Hoffman’s new buddies have used this technique for at least a year despite numerous complaints.

MerchantCircle’s response, like Hoffman’s has been to pay lip service to its critics. Entrepreneur John Battelle contacted CEO Ben Smith a year ago. Smith promised to address the deceptive practice but — surprise, surprise — MerchantCircle continues the spam-calling to this day.

And Auren Hoffman can’t plead ignorance to MerchantCircle’s behavior. He has been prominently listed as an advisor to the company for quite some time.

How will Hoffman spin this one? His words promise one thing. His actions, quite another. As in the real world, one’s reputation is best judged not by what one says, but by the company one keeps.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 3:57 pm and is filed under rapleaf, Top, John Battelle, auren hoffman, MerchantCircle, Ben Smith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.