• The Jason Calacanis Weblog, Friday, March 20, 2009 11:45 AM

In a blog post, Mahalo founder and CEO Jason Calacanis, who will be speaking at MediaPost's OMMA Global Hollywood event in Los Angeles next week, explains the reasoning behind his offer to pay Twitter $250,000 to make him one of the service's "suggested" users. For starters, he says, the offer was for Mahalo's Answers product, not for Calacanis' personal account, which he says is "probably bigger than it should be" at 60,000-plus followers.

For a growing company like Mahalo, having its Answers product on the suggested users page represents a massive opportunity, resulting in as many as 10,000 new users per day. Calacanis says that what he ultimately wanted was the ability to drive one to two million visits to Mahalo a month from Twitter, which he reckons would translate into 250,000 new members of his service, at the cost of $1 per user.

"A quarter of a million dollars is attention-grabbing and that's exactly why I offered it: I wanted to splash the pot," he says, in order to get the attention of Twitter CEO Evan Williams and fellow co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. They have not cashed the check, however. Calacanis says he knew they wouldn't, claiming he was only "half-bluffing" with the offer anyway. "I've been in brief, but not substantive, discussions with each of them about marketing the Mahalo Answers product on Twitter," he says.

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