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Drew Curtis and Fark, Part Deux

August 7, 2008

Part two of Drew and fark.

Many people would think it was a handicap to build a web business in Kentucky.  Did you ever think of relocating?

No, I grew up here, it is cheap to live and travel is easy, I can catch a commuter flight and be in New York or LA by mid-morning.

You have been around the web for quite some time (10 years) what do you see as promising for the future?

If you look right now Facebook is the hottest thing and five years before that it was Myspace and before that it was compuserve.  Five years from now it will be something different. I think we will see an open format where you take your online identity with you, just reuse your profile so you could take your fark “profile” to whatever the new facebook is.

What’s new with Fark?

We have a news aggregator, farkit.com, you may have seen the button on our site.  It is a clone site where people can come and vote on stories but with oversight so their won’t be any vidoes of puppies at the top like on Digg.  We are going to tell everybody up-front that if some stupid shit gets voted to the front, we reserve the right to remove it. Comments are going to work the same way with a vote for best and funniest for each article but we want to keep as much the same and as seamless as possible so if someone doesn’t want to participate they don’t have to.

We have started a travel site. We are building in the functionality for travel ratings.  We already see people posting questions for what are the best places to go in a particular city.  We have recoded everythingin Perl and will have a beta launch August 11th which will have some twitter functionality as well as some social networking features.

Basically the hardest thing to do on the web is build an audience.  We have an audience now we just want to try new things that we think will leverage our 4 million farkers and give them more of what they want.  Another example would be location based services, We think it would be cool if you were in a new city at a party etc to have a feature where Farkers could see if other people who used Fark were in the vicinity, they would at least have that in common.  It would make a great dating site, you already know you have something in common, you both like Fark.

Finally, I have heard you talk about the troubles of traditional media, can you give us a short rant on this?

Mid-market dailies are the most screwed, as are local tv newsrooms. They don’t do local well enough to compete with the alternative papers/sites, and they don’t do national well enough to compete with AP/Reuters.

 Time for another round!

 

 

Written by Richard Stump · Filed Under Blog, Startups 

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