Just yesterday I reviewed a local website Mallr. I went on to talk to Derek regarding Mallr, the future of Mallr and his double-space habits through Windows Live Messenger.
Mallr is one of the few local internet web site. It’s started by Kevin and Derek with Kevin doing most of the dirty work. It’s cool to have more local websites around.
(Screenshot of Mallr.)
The entire chat transcript
Mr. Dew (Dew): So Derek, just who are you?
Derek from Mallr: A person who is passionate about Technology, sleeps, eats, breathes and works with the Internet. I work at a technology firm that feeds me and in my spare time, I work on Mallr with some of my mates.
Dew: And you’re from Singapore?
Derek: You bet
Dew: Care to tell me more about Mallr? How did it begin?
Derek: That’s interesting. Mallr started out as an idea to capture images of shops within Malls so that people can virtually find what a Mall has. We then evolved into a Reviews site mimicking a certain Yelp.com but food reviews site are in abundant and hardly catch on. We wanted to do something fun yet social where people can contribute stuff. In Singapore, media and news are still very much controlled and limited. So we thought if we could help to liberalize this industry by introducing a ranked news site, that will be cool. Apparently, it turned out to be very similar to a much more popular site - Digg. We haven’t turned back since.
Dew: Wow, it certainly has evolved a lot. Yeah, I noticed it looked like Digg.com. One thing I dislike about Digg.com is that it lacks local news. I never knew what’s trendy locally and Mallr would be helpful for me, hahaa… Let’s talk a little about the programming part. How long did you guys take? Who’s involved and who’s just slacking around?
Derek: We’ve pretty much coded for a few months & toying with a lot of CMS by the time we thought of doing a social news site. It really didn’t take a lot of time probably, 2 weeks to get the thing started. There are a few open source reversed-engineered software out there and looking thru the source helped. Kevin did most of the dirty work. We just aren’t design people to make the interface slick.
Dew: Is that a ready-make CMS that you guys used and it’s all created from a scratch?
Derek: We did model ourselves after a CMS but some of the codes, widgets and images were added separately.
Dew: That’s cool and a lot of work involved. I mentioned before that Mallr would need a bigger community to be successful, any plans on how to achieve that?
Derek: Advertising on beconfused.com is definitely one alternative, no kidding on this. We feel that the local community still does not have the initiative to vote/submit stories. Acquiring users is challenging but the biggest challenge is to acquire active users. Personally, I do not believe social networks grow organically so we probably have to ‘reward’ users in some way or another.
Dew: I could always add link to Mallr. You mention about rewarding users, could you elaborate more on that part?
Derek: We have a few things we want to do, rewarding top users, either through intangible or tangible benefits. Another possibility is to organize little contests to drive traffic to the website. iPod, PSP, or something cool. We welcome everyone’s suggestions.
Dew: I suggest a Top 10 contributor list, it’s a feel good thing but it works all the time. I would love a Nintendo Wii, hahaa… Speaking of traffic, is Mallr ready to handle the traffic. Would Mallr be able to handle the Digg effect?
Derek: I like the idea of a Top 10 contributor list as well! In terms of traffic handling, we are still on a shared box and if usage really goes through the roof, there’s no reason why we wouldn’t get a dedicated server or two. Its amazing how entrepreneurship has evolved, look at easy and cheap is for people to start a web business nowadays.
Dew: That would set you guys back quite a bit! I noticed Mallr doesn’t have advertisements, doesn’t take donations and doesn’t sell T-shirts, any intentions of making it profitable?
Derek: We still haven’t think of monetizing the website, not foreseeable in the next half a year at least. Our primary focus is to get people to use this cool service and really have people understand how the Internet can make the water cooler talk so much easier. Mallr is about sharing that cool story or awesome image/video you saw and sharing it with your friends. All in all… We still don’t need to have external funds coming in to pay for the web hosting and etc. We are just committed to improve the site and no, it was never about the money.
Dew: Perhaps you can get more websites to link back to you guys, that way, they can share Mallr with more people too. Digg has this cool feature where you can blog directly, ever considered adding this feature?
Derek: We did. In fact, my good friend talked about it over dinner to me just today. Our concern is just that bloggers might not even insert this snippet of codes into their blogs. We want to launch something that people will use and have fun using them. Getting people to have fun and make merry at the main site is our biggest focus at this point of time.
Dew: I always link back my sources; it’s kinda like a courtesy thing. Digg made it really easy for me, I think a quarter of my recent posts are blogged using Digg. I see Mallr has a trackback feature; I don’t quite get how to use it unfortunately. How does that work?
Derek: Unfortunately, i’m not the best person to tell you more about the trackback. I’ll make sure I follow this up, though.
Dew: That’s okay, so what’s the next step for Mallr? Any exciting features coming up?
Derek: Reaching the critical mass is still our priority. We’ve set some milestones that we want to achieve over the next few months. Traffic’s been increasing; we hope to get the site out to more people before we roll up new features. Certainly, a fortnightly podcast dedicating to the latest news, gossips and important stories in Singapore will be somewhere we want to get to.
Dew: That’s really cool. Hmmmp, I noticed you end your sentences with double-spaces, and not many are doing that. Anything to say to everyone?
Derek: I use double spacing, makes reading easier. Come and share interesting links with the rest of the community! Would be awesome to see more comments and votes coming in.
End of interview.
The transcript has been edited for spelling mistakes that’s common in instant messenging. It’s always interesting to ask people questions. I wish Derek and Kevin all the best in improving Mallr. And, to show your support for Singapore website Mallr, the best way is to register an account and start posting news.
Tags: interview, screenshot, singapore