Preople: when the deadpool shimmers, try eBay

Written on 17th July 2008                                                                                                              COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

My co-editor Boris is not just a blogger, but a serial Internet entrepreneur. Starting a bunch of companies comes with success – like his first one, V3, and more recently, Twittercounter -, and failure. Today, we’ll discuss the latter.

One of Boris’ ideas didn’t really worked out. Preople (Pagerank for people) is a tool that checks your Internet fame – using a “complicated calculation”. In the early days of this product – March 2005 -, it received quite some press coverage and several web celebs – like Matt Mullenweg – calculated their score. Just like Twittercounter (Feedburner for Twitter), it concerns the human ego, which seems to be the key to success.

Well, turns out it isn’t: as Preople has become the home of spammers and bad php arguments. Preople needs some medical help from a geek, somebody who has the time and will to give the ego booster tool a second chance.

Boris isn’t gonna be that geek, as he’s busy with this blog. He decided to put his baby on eBay. Not for free though, as potential buyers can start bidding at $999,- (€630).

I’m not sure whether this auction will succeed. But hey, I’m here to inspire you. So here’s another way to get rid of a start-up that doesn’t tickle your fancy anymore.