Secondly, congratulations on selling to Tucows. I did link to Elliot’s post about why Tucows bought Kiko.

Thirdly, there isn’t any conspiracy theorism here or was intended, I merely suggested the timing was suspicious to me. Pull yourself out of the chain for a minute, and you don’t think this perspective is at all valid and reasonable given the sequence of events?

I didn’t link to any of your Kiko postings because they didn’t have to do with Odeo and were merely tangentially related to this post as a personal opinion aside as you, yourself, admitted with the hijacking part of your first comment. If this is important to you then why not link your postings yourself to reinenforce your point? This is welcomed activity here which you may or may not not be familiar with. We like when readers add additional context to something

Now with that housekeeping stuff aside, please let’s keep it real about eBay. I’ve been an eBayer for years and both bid and sold through eBay many times. I’m very familiar with eBay from both sides and have yet to see publicity ever negatively impact an eBay auction.

You wrote: “If we had the same blogger buzz but everyone was saying what a steaming pile Kiko was do you think it would have sold?”

YES! Please point me to one ebay auction where people have talked about something up for auction — good, bad or indifferent — and it has actually hurt the price of the eBay auction? People already knew the service was a failure and that’s why it had to be sold, so why didn’t that drive down the price? Becaue it was bought for the technology, not its ability to exist on its own. People buy all sorts of things on eBay for different reasons (some that make no sense at all) and if they don’t know something is for sale (no promotion or advertising or whatever you want to call what you folks were doing), then that’s less potential bidders.

People don’t believe everything they read. Yes, even negative posts/reviews from established, reliable sources saying that something sucks. But Kiko was vindicated in that regard when Elliot from Tucows pointed out that the technology behind Kiko was what interested them. You see, they didn’t care if blogger a,b,c said it was a steaming pile.

Congratulations on the sale.

You’re conspiracy theorism is both flattering and depressing (in that you would acknowledge our honesty for posting but then turn around and question the honesty of our intentions). The least you could do is link it to our posts that you reference since there’s no such thing as negative publicity.

If we had any plan for introspective posts on Kiko it would have been to write them *after* the auction. Simply because talking about the reasons why Kiko *failed* would probably *drive down* the auction. We (Justin and myself) put together our posts rather rapidly to combat the deluge of incorrect assumptions from industry “pundits”. You can find two posts on Kiko on my blog in rapid succession: the first is the planned “we’re throwing in the towel” one that’s pretty benign and very soon after is rushed the rebuttal post (which ended up going through many revisions because of the speed at which I felt it had to be delivered).

Sorry for hijacking the discussion, proceed to beatup on Odeo