TradeVibes the smart choice for bloggers

Although this article is about TradeVibes and CrunchBase I felt it was necessary to first relate a story for background and perspective. Hopefully this will help fore-shadow and support my position later on in the article as I discuss it.

A few months back the Inquisitr a new technology and pop media website launched under the stewardship of veteran blogger Duncan Riley and his band of merry men. Duncan at the time had only just left TechCrunch (TC) the owners of CrunchBase to start the Inquisitr and was heralded as a great man by Michael Arrington (deleted) his ex-boss.

Everyone thought it was impressive that outspoken Duncan could leave TC to start a rival site and still remain in the good graces of hard-liner Michael Arrington, but he did and that lasted about a week before Michael deleted his article of praise and brought the Iron Curtain down on Duncan blocking him from anything TC.

Now what is TradeVibes or for that matter CrunchBase well they are essentially the same product, as Duncan points out in his very comprehensive article;

“Crunchbase and Tradevibes are immediately similar in the information they provide, to the point that Michael Arrington has previously described Tradevibes as a Crunchbase ripoff.”

Source: Inquisitr - Battle of the Company Databases: CrunchBase Vs. TradeVibes

But this article isn’t about the nuanced differences between their offering as Duncan definitely hit that very well. Nope this article is about business and why TradeVibes should be your first and only choice.

The Choice

When you are thinking about placing a widget or really any other API driven application such as TradeVibes you are really with a handshake or pen and paper forming a partnership. So when choosing consider this, do you trust this service to be your partner? Is the relationship mutually supportive? And most importantly do they compete with you?

I always say ‘Trust is knowing what is in that persons perceived best interests’.

So do I trust TradeVibes or CrunchBase? NO, I don’t trust them. I don’t know their management, I have never met any of them, I don’t know their business plan and I don’t have an agreement other than agreeing to their TOS.

Is the relationship mutually supportive, it would appear that both TradeVibes and CrunchBase want websites to utilise their data, particularly now with their APIs and Widgets making integration easy and familiar. But what do they get? One could speculate, what do you think they get?

Here is the clincher point for this particular discussion, do they compete with you? TradeVibes does not appear to compete with me or any of my peers and they even rely on users like us to populate their database, this is not the case for CrunchBase. Additionally CrunchBase is owned by the biggest gorilla in the market TechCrunch the press release publishing machine.

So you see, the story about Duncan Riley choosing TradeVibes was hardly a surprise for someone as savy as him and is a testiment to Michael’s single minded nature that he could even be surprised by this decision. If you are smart you will follow Duncan’s lead and for that matter Mashable’s as well

It is actually a simple argument and I invite you to discuss the merits of it and as well as your suggestions.