Small Business Directory Inadvertently Opens Door for Competition

LOS ANGELES, CA - Like most everyone else throwing their two cents into the discussion over the 2012 edition of Merchant Circle versus the community we'd all grown to know and love, I'd like to personally take this opportunity to state on record my opposition to MerchantCircle's 2012 overhaul of the site design and functionality.

Merchants who contribute content should be rewarded for their efforts, and before January of 2012 they were. Now, our blog posts aren't even featured on our company homepage, nor are our products, photos or coupons. The fact that MC has shifted focus away from those creating content and towards those paying for placement is a move that will undoubtedly upset a number of business owners in addition to myself, opening the proverbial door of opportunity for competitors to move in on the space the old MC had occupied.

Merchant Circle's 2012 overhaul has angered users, opening the door for competitors to move in.

Instead of the 2011 profiles, which largely featured a merchant's contributions on his or her own small business' homepage on the site, those pages now have more ads to competitors' pages and websites, with only reviews displayed beneath the company bio on company homepages. The category links that once appeared on my Merchant Circle company homepage are now gone, as is the Google +1 button (although it remains on some of the pages that haven't yet adopted the new design).

Many formerly free features now cost far more than fair market value based on pricing for similar services at those few companies who do charge for them.

Rather than labor for the benefit of companies with the resources to pay to be prominently featured on my Merchant Circle company homepage that doesn't even link to my recent blog posts, photos, coupons or deals, I will instead most likely be spending more time on similar sites --- alternatives to Merchant Circle --- preferably sites that won't use bait-and-switch tactics to trick users to generate loads of free content, only to see the commercial benefit of said content be taken away from them.

One such site is called StoreBoard. At StoreBoard, you have a company profile, such as the one I have already created for Egan Medical. Like Merchant Circle, companies get their own blog, and can add coupons, list products in the marketplace, post images, classifieds and even links to their company's respective site-within-a-site.

The company blogs are superior to those at MC as the option to add photographs to posts actually functions properly, meaning the photo actually appears, and all text and HTML show beneath the photo also appears on the page for each respective post. As most users of Merchant Circle who've tried to add photos to blog posts without completely coding the entire page from scratch, the photos usually don't appear, and all text/HTML appearing beneath the photo does not appear either. I once lost more than an hour's work because I forgot to independently save a copy of my MC blog post on my own computer, and lost it when I attempted to include a photo in the post, only to find that all photos and everything appearing beneath them just gets deleted on MC blogs. StoreBoard blogs also give the user superior formatting options compared to those offered by MC.

Here is an example post by Egan Medical Equipment about a new line of products (maternity supports, to be specific) which now are available for purchase through the company's online store: Egan Medical Unveils New Line of Maternity Supports.

Obviously, the site is newer and not as powerful, so the benefit of your activity there won't have the immediate and meaningful impact being featured prominently at Merchant Circle once had.


In fact, each company gets its own links page, and as long as the links don't violate the company's terms of service, users can pretty much post anything they think their customers will appreciate, be it links to products, articles, news stories or whatever else might be useful.

Like Merchant Circle, all that is displayed on a given company's homepage is their bio and contact info (including website link). However, I haven't seen any ads for competitors either while logged in or out, so if they exist they're minimal and out-of-the-way, and you won't see your hard work serve to benefit a larger competitor with a bigger advertising budget.

While we're on the topic of new competitors to the Small Business Online Directory business, one not-so-new player is making a new and significant push to add features that might lure users away from competitors such as MC. Well known, established directory site Manta has added a number of features that will definitely appeal to merchants, and which are superior to the comparable features offered by MC.
Take for example this product page, which is more like a general category page about maternity supports (basically an orthopedic support for women during pregnancy) than a singular product page. The maternity supports page was recently created for a small business profile at Manta. Observe the large photo of the product, the ability to list either a singular price for a specific item or a price range for a class or group of items. Also, observe the length of the product description, which far outpaces the amount of space given by MC for product pages, and even then there were no links to the actual product page on the merchant's website. Manta has all that and more. While I'm no profit, it would seem a logical conclusion that Manta may be soon offering merchants the opportunity to blog directly from their Manta profile, which would get Manta up-to-par in terms of everyone else in the business with regard to the amount and extent of features available to merchants willing to spend their time creating content for the site for free in exchange for a small but sometimes meaningful bit of a promotional opportunity and benefit.

Unless and until Manta and StoreBoard "pull a MerchantCircle" and revokes the most appealing features of its site for the benefit of a handful of each industry's largest and richest players, I will likely be spending as much if not more time developing Egan Medical's presence within the StoreBoard community as I will continue to spend here on Merchant Circle.

I'll also stop paying for a certain Merchant Circle paid upgrade if said upgrade (they know to which one I am referring) fails to reappear on my company profile within the next 7 days.

Anyway, I hope someone at Merchant Circle is eventually made aware of all the displeasure among business owners and their respective employees about the recent overhaul of Merchant Circle's design and functionality, and I sincerely hope the big MC can get it together and make real improvements rather than changes that prey upon small business owners as much as they help them.

Capybara, Would You Like to Explain This?

Is Capybara the Beast from the book of Revelation? His recent activity over at the Mixxingbowl seems to suggest so.

I was minding my own business, reading the news and occasionally commenting when I came across something disturbing while perusing through some of Capybara's submissions. Rather than describe to you what I saw, I included the screenshot below, in which you can see exactly what I saw when I happened upon a page I was never supposed to see.

FALSE ALARM:  Capybara was briefly considered a potential Antichrist suspect as a result of an apparent misunderstanding.

Needless to say, I was extremely alarmed upon seeing that, especially as Capybara has never shown any indication whatsoever for a capacity for evil, much less the potential for being the sinister villain from the final book of the Bible. I decided to double-check so as to be absolutely certain it was true before publicly levying the accusation.

I pulled up the official Antichrist Identification Device from Jaspax.com and ran the name. In a split-second, the suspense was over:

Capybara IS NOT the Antichrist.

We looked through 55 different calculations for the numerical value of "Capybara", but NONE of them were equal to the number of the beast. Congratulations!

I wasn't totally shocked by the result, but there was one detail over which I was puzzled. If Capybara isn't the Antichrist, why did his activity page at the Bowl boldly display the number of the beast? The only logical reason would be if the Mixxingbowl itself were some way tied to Prince of Darkness.

On a hunch, I decided to try running through a couple of names of people I knew are affiliated with the site. The results were predictable.

Gregory Davies IS the Antichrist!

Here's proof:

1. Write "Gregory Davies" as separate words.
2. Transliterate the result into Greek: γρεγωρι δαβηης. Numerical values for Greek letters are found here.
3. Alternately subtract and add the numerical values of the letters in each word, then take the absolute value of the result. Add together the numerical values of each word. This gives the following:
γ ρ ε γ ω ρ ι δ α β η η ς
( 3 - 100 + 5 - 3 + 800 - 100 + 10) + ( 4 - 1 + 2 - 8 + 8 - 6)
4. The result is 616! Did you know that in the earliest manuscripts of the Bible 616 is the number of the beast? It's true! Plus, wouldn't it make perfect sense for the Enemy to disguise his true face all these years by getting people to believe in the wrong Bible?

Don't be deceived! Now you have absolute PROOF that Gregory Davies is the Antichrist!

Spread the word! Click here to go to a linkable page, or copy and paste the following text into your webpage or blog to let everyone know that Gregory Davies is the Antichrist.
Mathematical proof that Gregory Davies is the Antichrist!

For anyone scratching their head, the aforementioned also goes by the name of cGt2099. It should come as no surprise Davies has emerged as a candidate/suspect to become the most evil person in all of religion. Back in 2009, he admitted/proclaimed as much when early rumors were beginning to surface.

So is cGt2099 the Antichrist? If only it were so simple.

At least two other names that have been widely rumored to be the Antichrist have been confirmed as such.  It is unclear at this point if Davies is in cahoots with Kevin Rose and Barack Hussein Obama as a sinister apocalyptic trifecta, or if the three must contend for the singular honor.

God did not respond to an email seeking comment about the Antichrist situation.

Mixx Refugees Taking Up Shelter at the Mixxingbowl, Old Dogg

The Mixxingbowl (mixxingbowl.com) is a social news, photo and video sharing site and community that is relatively new and comprised of many of Mixx's former movers-and-shakers. It started as a user-owned and supported forum to compliment the original Mixx.com. When Mixx was acquired by UberMedia, slightly more than half of the users from Mixx who more-or-less determined what content would appear on the Mixx.com front-page, category front-pages, popular page, and such have sought shelter at the Bowl.

Mixx.com was an extremely large and powerful social news, photo and video sharing community.  The site was founded in 2007 by former USA Today chief strategist and later Yahoo News GM Chris McGill's company Recommended Reading, Inc. Mixx burst on to the scene at a time when Digg had been enforcing both its written and unwritten rules with an extremely heavy hand. Users were being banned left-and-right for reasons unbeknownst to many of them, often for a first-offense (if TOU was an issue). A couple of the more established "power Diggers" got the axe as well. This turned out to be an extremely bad decision for a number of reasons. First and foremost, one of those banned top-100 Diggers named Greg Davies (cGt2099) happened upon Mixx shortly after receiving word that his appeal of the permaban had been denied.

Davies blogged about Mixx, and encouraged other banned Diggers to take shelter at this brand-new social media start-up that wanted them as members of its fledgling community and pledged not to take them for granted (provided they abide by the site's TOU and not spam the place to death). Word quickly spread that if you were banned from Digg, you could join the community at Mixx and not be judged for being exiled from the niche's only true major player. In fact, banned Diggers instead found a sympathetic ear (or a few hundred) at Mixx. Digg had never anticipated all of its banned users joining together and founding their own (penal) colony. Did I mention Davies is a native of Australia?

The other thing Digg never anticipated was the media coverage Mixx would receive in the weeks and months after its inception.

Here is a partial list of the top news stories about Mixx from the site's first 24 months or so as a live community:

- Stealthy Startup Mixx Launches Into Private Beta - TechCrunch
- Digg Refugees May Be Heading To Mixx - TechCrunch - My comment from almost 4 years ago
- Of Digg "Refugees" and Mixx - History shows us that Mark Evans, Tony Hung and author Mathew Ingram were very wrong about this one.
- Active Diggers Mixxing it Up
- Community quality and network leadership trump numbers: Digg loses contributors to Mixx
- Digg users flock to Mixx
- Why I Dig Mixx (and Nixed Digg)
- Mixx: Will it become the new Digg?
- CNN.com Adds Mixx To Its Mix Of Bookmarking Buttons
- Mashable On Mixx: 30+ of Our Most Popular Stories
- Look Out Digg: Mixx Public Beta Coming on Tuesday
- LA Times Invests in Social News Site Mixx
- MIXX TEAMS UP WITH USA TODAY, REUTERS.COM, WEATHER CHANNEL AND LEADING ONLINE PUBLISHERS TO DELIVER PERSONALIZED NEWS, IMAGES AND VIDEO
- The CNN.com Effect: Mixx More Than Doubles Visitors in May To Nearly One Million
- Looking back at Mixx during 2009
- In Memorial of Violet Planet - A Day in the Life - Beatles Video
- Mixxing 102: How to become a SuperMixxer
- Mixx to Digg: We Break News Faster

Mixx eventually ballooned to the point of boasting several tens of millions of unique registered user accounts.

Over the years since its inception the site has had about 450-500 users who wielded substantially more influence than your average Mixx unknown.  These were the ones whose avatars (and links to their profile pages) rotated in-and-out of the ten spots on "Top Mixxers" section of the Mixx Classic homepage.  When the sale occurred and Mixx announced that it would be switching to a new system and that all records, data, pages, content, accounts and everything else associated with the Mixx we knew would be permanently lost in the switch, slightly more than half of those who were active at Mixx during its final months took refuge at the Mixxingbowl.

Others sought shelter at Amplify and Old Dogg (both right-leaning) and still others at ZoomIt.ca (Canadians).  Most of Mixx's left-wing is at the bowl, along with a token few from the right side of the aisle.  Many from both sides I would not consider activists, and most of those I would classify as such most are good, decent people with whom I may disagree but also with whom I have had many an interesting, polite and civil conversation.  It is unfortunate that I cannot make the same statement about everyone that has taken shelter at the bowl post-Mixx.

One of the common themes about where Mixxers took refuge is that most if not all of the other "household name" sites are nowhere on the radar of the displaced community.  From its first days, Mixxers from all backgrounds and from all beliefs shared one thing in common: an extremely bitter taste in their collective mouths for Digg.  Most are simply too sophisticated to find much of an appeal in Reddit or its community.  Newsvine could have made a play but to my knowledge has not sheltered any Mixx refugees.

If anyone reading this is a Mixx refugee or knows a Mixx refugee in need of shelter, please contact me via the comments at the bottom of the post and I will be happy to help them find a new home.