Kikin: Hole Filling Is Not a Business Model

Kikin is a NYC startup that, as their web copy says, “brings you more relevant posts, tweets, videos, and other cool stuff from popular sites,” by automatically displaying interesting links on your browser page.  Its proposition is that you trust your social network, so the Kikin software trolls your Twitter and Facebook streams for relevant content that has been contributed by friends, family, and co-workers.

This idea is especially powerful when making purchasing decisions, less so for knowledge areas  involving, say, the new FCC policy on cable set-top boxes.

This small company garnered some good press about a year ago.

Since then Google has been busy filling in a few of its holes, a platform tweak that will ultimately force  niche players to, well, find a new niche in the ecosystem.  Of course, Google has also been expanding the pond with products such as  Google Wave, Google Buzz,  and Google Predict.

Within the search realm, Google has been  upgrading their results to include timely Twitter and blog posts from across the Web. They’ve add the Wonderwheel to organize returned content as semantic relationships. In the Labs backroom, they wheeled out a beta version of Google Squared—a response to Wolfram’s Alpha—which does a capable job of pulling  relevant, related information into a spreadsheet. And they’ve matched Kikin, by including  tweets of those within your Google Buzz contact list (which you can find on the bottom of your returned Google page).

Not bad.

As I was trying out Kikin,which displays its relevant data nuggets on the top portion of Google search pages, my navigation finger instinctively shifted toward Google’s revised left column, which organizes results by timeliness.

Kikin searches Google Reader subscriptions

I couldn’t help myself: knowing what the entire Web—not just a small part of it— is saying on a subject is incredibly valuable.

If the wisdom of the crowd has any meaning (and it does), then listening to the crowd should give you wiser and  better answers than relying on the same old circle of friends.

Crowd wisdom, guided by recommendation algorithms (clustering, bayesian classifiers,etc.), is the basis behind startups, such as Hunch, Parse.ly, knowmore, and many others.  These players are doing much more than enhancing  search platform features.

In Kikin’s favor, they do have a slickly designed Firefox plug-in that overlays a bar of related links on the top  portion of certain web sites.

As a prominent NYC  VC pointed out, with respect to another platform (Twitter): you can’t build a significant business with small feature additions that should have been initially addressed by the underlying software.

Kikin hasn’t created a truly new application in the current version of their beta product.

I will use continue to use it, but I’m less inclined to when faced with better Google substitutes.

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