Update

You will have noticed a few small changes on the site.

The profile pages have been completely redone with bigger pictures, new ways to share what you love and more. You can edit and update your profile.

Now when you are posting a product, you can also list the exact prices as well as give kudos to the blog where you stumbled across the product, if that's the case. Go ahead and check it out while posting something.

There has also been an another nice review of iliketotallyloveit.com on orangeinks.com.
Besides this you might want to check our blog again on Monday, because we have pretty cool news coming up.

Mashable is starting to really like our name!

A little longer than a year ago we were on Mashable.com for the first time and Pete Cashmore wasn’t to fond of our name (and our site):

I’m unimpressed, and that ridiculous name doesn’t help.

We liked our name and so did others.

Kristen Nicole wrote about us late last year, but didn’t share her thaughts about our name.

Today Alana Taylor wrote a post about us and is now officially iliketotallyloveit.com’s favorite Mashable editor. Why? She gets the name (as well as the service) and why it’s good:

What sets ILikeTotallyLoveIt apart from all the various shopping social networks, such as ThisNext and DealBundle, is not only its catchy domain name but the fact that it is not constrained by rigid labels.

Thanks, Alana! We finally feel understood.

Blacklisted by Digg!

We, iliketotallyloveit.com, now carry the dubious distinction of being blocked, banned and blacklisted by Digg. The verdict? Spam, dammit! As a social shopping site with a growing community behind us, we are acutely aware of this problem, so we take the allegation seriously and apologize to Digg users who might have been inconvenienced.

However, we also think that Digg’s approach to this issue is heavy handed (c’mon, a brief note to our tech. support could have resolved this with dignity) and reveals cognitive dissonances between the claims of online democracy and the decidedly more dictatorial reality.

We inquired with Digg Support and share their reply with a few thoughts and annotations. (Digg’s statement and passages from their FAQ and ToS in italics.)

Why?

The [iliketotallyloveit.com] domain has been consistently reported by the Digg community as a spam site and a news middle man site.

What do you consider “spam” and a “news middleman”?

When submitting content to Digg, please link directly to the originating source of that content. Blog posts are fine, as long as they're not plagiarized and don't just summarize the content. However, if any URL within Digg is consistently flagged as spam by the Digg community, that URL may be blocked from future submissions.

Yes, iliketotallyloveit.com links to online merchandisers who sell the products that users post on our site with their own reviews, comments and notes, thus adding value to the original source. If this qualifies as spam, Digg would need to shut out thousands of other sites, otherwise blackballing iliketotallyloveit would look arbitrary, right?

We didn’t think they’d be so rude, so we submitted postings from Reddit, del.icio.us, buzz.yahoo.com, mister-wong.com, lifestream.fm, twitter.com, netvibes.com, mixx.com, popurls.com, stumbleupon.com and from social shopping sites like buzzillions.com, crowdstorm.com, epinions.com, kaboodle.com, osoyou.com, shopstyle.com, stylefeeder.com, stylehive.com, thisnext.com, wishpot.com, zebo.com, wists.com. It worked every time, so our originating sources can’t be the reason for the ban.

Could it be voting envy?

Another reason might be that we too allow users to vote for their favorite products. In our early days we were often labeled a Digg clone, which didn’t thrill us, because it dismisses our focus on community-driven online shopping. Again, we gave them the benefit of the doubt and submitted content to Digg from other services that at one time or another were anointed Digg clones like sk-rt.com, meneame.net, bringr.com, videobomb.com, diglog.com, yigg.de, dzone.com, sportsflip.com, hugg.com, sphinn.com, deals.com, newsheat.com, agentb.com, dealigg.com, pixelgroovy.com, scoreguru.com, videosift.com, urlbump.com, tubigg.com, vroomr.net, playgroundbaby.com. And none of these sites appeared to be blocked.

What constitutes “abuse”?

Reading Digg’s FAQ stokes the suspicion that it is ridiculously easy to report anything or anyone as offensive or abusive.

If you encounter abuse, please email us at abuse@digg.com. Please be sure to include the URL of the page where you found the … abuse occurring and any other pertinent details.

For the past 12+ months we tracked 60 submissions to Digg from our domain. That works out to approximately five per month, on average. If that qualifies as abuse, you probably haven’t opened your inbox in a while.

So who’s calling the shots?

When submitted domains are consistently reported as spam, the domain is blocked from further submission. Unblocking the domain is not in line with the interests of the Digg community.

Really? Listen up, community: Digg knows best what’s in line with your interests. But then again, they don’t really need your interests and complaints to block domains, remove content or whole accounts. From the ToS:

Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all.

To circle back to the beginning, a quote from How Digg Works:

Digg is democratizing digital media. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you.

Reviewing the facts, as they are known to us, we cannot help but think that Digg is slightly disingenuous with their claims and handles complaints arbitrarily, thus undermining the community concept and their own credibility.

But that’s just us. What do you think?

A Tweet

We couldn't have said it any better!

Not blocked in China ... yet.

While we are doing some spring cleaning here at iliketotallyloveit.com (changes coming soon) Martin is in Beijing, China attending the First International Conference on Symbolic Computation and Cryptography. Why am I mentioning this? Well, he just sent me a message saying that iliketotallyloveit.com is NOT blocked in China. I guess that is a good thing, right?

San Francisco: Pretty, Pricey

The steep hills of San Francisco aren’t just challenging for parking, they are synonymous for the steep climb start-up companies are facing in a place that’s perfect for surfing and riding bicycles and, as we have learned, for growing a business. Fellow entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, industry analysts, social events, conferences, it all happens in this neighborhood. However, there are many competitors in the race for funds, so you have to run fast to get there first. And while you do that as a frugal startup artist, you’ll be spending some bucks.

Rents are outrageous. $3,000 for a two-bedroom apartment in a decent area of the city is the norm. Service providers like PR agencies are plenty, but most of them aren’t looking for cash-strapped clients. If you have budget, you’re OK, but if your prescribed monthly burn rate for the entire operation is $10,000, you better get used to the thought of raising more cash or sending out press releases yourself.

Clocks are ticking faster, too. Not just those of the old-fashioned parking meters, where a quarter of an hour seems to have only 12 minutes, but also the clock that determines the cycle of cool new business models. You have to be alert and proactive or you look old in a hurry. The fact that your site offers social networking hardly getting you attention, because a lot of others are doing it, too. Here, a good idea never lives underground for long. And once others see the merit, they take it, they shake it, they spin it and tweak it to make it into the next big thing. Invigorating and challenging.

Luckily, there are escapes. At the bar of the posh St. Regis Hotel, next door to the Museum of Modern Art, we connected with David Silverman, a colleague from the early days of electronic commerce at Intershop, who now is with Aggregate Knowledge, a company that connects consumers to hot products, interesting content and cool items. Joining us was Michelle Gildersleeve, who also worked at Intershop and now is with a small outfit called Oracle;-)

For some exercise we climbed the steps from Levis Plaza, the home of the original 501 to the urban oasis of Telegraph Hill and descended down the west side into North Beach http://www.sfnorthbeach.org/index.html, San Francisco’s Little Italy, right next to Chinatown. It’s a Bohemian and touristy part of the City, which at one point or another served as a hangout for Marilyn Monroe and Joe Di Maggio, and of course, the titan of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac.

It was here that Kerouac got inspired for his seminal novel On the Road, which he wrote in 1951, in only three weeks, typing it out on a 120-foot scroll. Caffé Trieste, City Lights Books and the colorful corner of Grant and Green–not just a tribute to the famous jazz guitarist–are a few other places you should keep on your short list next time you visit.

As for us, we will be back soon.

Fishin' For Funds

After so much education it was time to get the lay of the land. Beginning in the 1960s, the orchards of Santa Clara Valley morphed into Silicon Valley–into office buildings, strip malls, and parking lots. In other words: a concrete jungle. But when you drive by Apple, Google, Yahoo, Cisco, or HP, it is easy to feel the rush by thinking about the possibilities. Steve, Sergey & Larry, or Jerry, they all once were in our shoes. Consequently, every other person you encounter on the street is, was, or will be involved in a startup.

We had a few more meetings on the calendar that day, so we hit El Camino south to Mountain View, to look around (and dream big). Gas was cheap – by European standards – and roads were wide, but not necessarily pristine. Some stretches along the freeways were filthy with garbage and often the pavement was loose or rutted from years of relentless traffic. To avoid the sticky spots, log on to Metropolitan Transport Commission or call 5-1-1 for free, real-time traffic updates. Inevitably, the road took us past the Postal Annex, a place that is useful in more than one way, as Malte found out.

Later, on the campus of San Jose State, we met Jan Beckers, a German Web entrepreneur, who despite his youth already has founded several, businesses. Jan is spending a few months in the area to get inspired for his next venture before he is moving to Shanghai, “to connect the dots, from Germany, to Silicon Valley, to China.”

As we worked our way back toward San Francisco we also met a funding consultant – @ Starbucks, of course. It was a nice and informal conversation, a friendly ping-pong of questions and answers. There were no commitments or promises, however a few days later we received a retainer agreement for the consultant’s services during completion of seed, Series A and Series B funding, which included a three-day coaching session, set-up of investor meetings and assistance with term sheet and close.

This retainer was followed by a warrant to buy shares of common stock in iliketotallyloveit.com, which turned out invalid for our current form of corporation. This can get really confusing, really fast. How do you value shares in your own company? How many shares would you even want to sell at such an early stage? There are no patent answers, but a mistake here will get expensive later on. Click around to get an idea about the issues and know where you can call for advice before the dance gets hot.

It was a long day and we were in no mood for commute traffic, so we picked Tandoori Oven, an Indian fast-food joint in P.A. to unwind. Little did Malte know that the hardest piece of work was still ahead of him: Parking on Russian Hill, one of the steeper inclines in all of San Francisco. It’s like parking in Paris, except that you can’t push the cars in front or behind you to make more room, because all drivers in this town curb their wheels. Religiously. How did he do? See below (photographed with a spy cam). If you are a sucker for tight-parking videos, here is your fix.



In the final instalment of this four-part blog series you'll learn about wild parrots and Kerouac’s old haunts, plus you'll meet some Valley veterans with ties to a company that started more than online shopping.