I was thinking of referring to Jigsaw as “MySpace for grownups,” (a site on which I am not registered, but on which I was intrigued to find that a guitar-playing, cigar-smoking gorilla named Redbendad had mentioned my Death March book) but after spending an hour meeting with Jigsaw’s Vice President of Marketing, Marc Parrish, I came to understand how important the Wikipedia angle really is (and I have to admit that it was Marc who gave me the analogy involving Hoover’s Online, a website I had completely forgotten about). It’s also important to differentiate Jigsaw from social networks like MySpace (and as well as LinkedIn and other sites for professionals and “grownups”) where people post their own information about themselves. Jigsaw, on the other hand, is a place where subscribers enter information about other people.

In particular, Jigsaw collects the kind of information that salespeople want when they’re looking for qualified prospects or “leads” to whom they can pitch their products and services: name, company, snail-mail address, email-address, and phone number. In addition, it’s usually very important to know the industry in which the prospect works, since a company name like “XYZ Corp.” often provides little or no clue. And it’s also important to know the prospect’s title, to increase the chances that you’re pitching your product or service to a decision-maker in the appropriate department or division.

Basically, Jigsaw provides this kind of name/company/title/ address/phone information about 3,753,671 people in 386,599 companies. Those were the figures posted on the Jigsaw website when I was writing this material, but roughly 10,000 new prospects are being added to the database each day, so the number will inevitably be larger by the time you read this. By contrast, LinkedIn (which has been around since mid-2003) has 6.5 million names.

But there’s a significant difference: each of LinkedIn’s 6.5 million names are there because its “owner” consciously and explicitly added his or her name to the LinkedIn system. I’m on LinkedIn because I wanted to be, and I’m directly “connected” to roughly 465 colleagues and business associates whom I know personally — some of whom were invited by me to join LinkedIn (at no cost to them or me) if they weren’t already on the system, and some of whom invited me to be part of their network. And LinkedIn makes a big deal of the “six degrees of separation” concept, on the theory that I might want to make a connection (e.g., to apply for a job, or to make a sales pitch) to someone who’s indirectly related to me. Thus, even though I have only 465 “friends” on the LinkedIn network, when you look at their network of friends, it means I can theoretically contact 63,200 people as a 2nd-level “friend of a friend.” And I can make 1,775,100 third-level connections, should I ever be so ambitious.

By contrast, I didn’t even know that my my name was part of Jigsaw’s 3.7-million person database — someone with the pseudonym of “Eden123″ added my name and contact details in mid-July 2006, presumably because he or she believed I was a viable prospect for some product or service. It’s important to note that it doesn’t really matter whether Eden123 has ever sold anything to me before, or whether he/she has ever contacted me; I’m merely an “asset” to be added to this ever-growing database.

And that brings up the Jigsaw’s interesting pricing approach: any of Jigsaw’s registered users (of whom there are approximately 100,000 at the present time) can “pay or play” to access these names. A subscription fee of $25/month provides a simple, straightforward way of accessing the names directly; but you can get a free subscription if you promise to add 25 new names per month to the database. On a transaction-by-transaction basis, registered users receive 5 “points” if they add a new contact, or correct an error in an existing contact record; and they “pay” 5 points if they “buy” a contact name.

Which brings us to the Wikipedia angle I mentioned at the beginning of this posting: one of the things that drives salespeople crazy (not to mention the prospects they contact!) is obsolete, incomplete, and/or misleading information. There’s little or no incentive for the prospect to correct erroneous data, particularly if (like me) he doesn’t even know that he’s in the database. But there’s a pseudo-economic incentive for salespeople to make such corrections: every time they do so, they accumulate more points which can be used to buy more names. And this becomes part of the larger “barter economy” upon which Jigsaw is based: it’s essentially a large network in which salespeople can swap (electronic) business cards of prospects.

But aside from the economics, it also means that Jigsaw is essentially a self-correcting system, with data constantly being updated (e.g., as prospects change jobs), corrected, cleaned up, and refined (e.g., a business title of “VP of Sales” being refined to a more accurate title of “VP of Sales and Marketing”). Of course, there’s no guarantee of 100% accuracy, but as a disinterested layman, I’d be willing to bet a reasonable chunk of money (or maybe some Jigsaw points!) that Jigsaw’s database is a lot cleaner than, say, the database of newspaper/magazine subscribers that account for a large percentage of the junk mail that fills my mailbox every day.

As I discussed all of this with Jigsaw’s Marc Parrish, I vaguely recalled that there had been a flurry of debates in the blogosphere about the ethics of Jigsaw’s approach. It apparently began with a March 23, 2006 blog piece by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington titled “Jigsaw is a Really, Really Bad Idea,” followed by an April 10th posting titled “Jigsaw Raises $12 million, still evil.” The first article generated 119 comments (as of the time I’m writing this posting), and the second one generated 39 comments; and it was eventually followed by an August 9, 2006 interview with Jigsaw’s CEO on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, titled “Ten Questions With ‘Dr. Evil’.”

You can read both sides of the debate and draw your own conclusions. I have to admit that initially I had a visceral reaction when I found my name on Jigsaw’s database and wondered if my contact details (which, ironically, are not technically incorrect, but basically irrelevant for anyone trying to sell anything to me — not that it matters to me if hordes of salespeople are basically following dead-end, useless information in their attempt to contact me) were being traded back and forth as if I was just a pile of chopped liver.

But as Marc Parrish diplomatically reminded me, an awful lot more information about me — including credit details, and God only knows what else — is on the databases of Dun & Bradstreet(D&B), Experian, Equifax, and Acxiom. At least Experian and Equifax display a prominent message on their home page about reviewing one’s credit report and correcting errors — though it requires acknowledging and agreeing to a 10-page, 3,906-word legal contract that scrolls up, 5 lines at a time, in a tiny window on the website (did it ever occur to you that all of those legal documents we casually agree to on the Internet are this detailed?)!

Similarly, Jigsaw provides a fairly straightforward mechanism for people like me to find out if we’re already on its database, to correct any inaccuracies we find, and even to provide potential salespeople with detailed guidelines on how they should or should not be contacted. By contrast, neither Axciom nor D&B do so — and I was amused to see that D&B’s information about my corporate address was six months out of date; given the arrogant fashion in which they contact me, once a year, to update their information, it will be a cold day in Hell before I go out of my way to help them correct the information.

Meanwhile, Parrish reminded me that, notwithstanding whatever privacy laws may have been enacted here in the U.S. in recent years, there is an enormous amount of information from voting records, hospital records (including births and deaths), and commercial transactions (credit cards, subscriptions, and other transactions) that are captured, categorized, and sold to anyone willing to pay the price.

Of course, you could argue that two wrongs don’t make a right: just because all of these other other nefarious data collection activities are taking place doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s okay for Jigsaw (or anyone else) to gather such information. But from what I could see, the information Jigsaw is gathering is simple business-related information, not personal information like income, race, religion, or even one’s mobile phone number. In a nutshell, it’s the kind of information we all put on our business cards; and if business people give their business cards to other business people, then it’s public.

Ultimately, I think Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy’s famous 1999 remark, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” is still true today. On a privacy scale of “good” to “evil,” Jigsaw may not be at the far end of the “good” end of the scale, but it’s certainly nowhere near the “evil” end, notwithstanding Michael Arrington’s tirade. Most of my business-contact details are in the phone book, for goodness sake; and anyone with half a brain can figure out how to track down the details of my email address and the industry I work in. I typically get half a dozen phone calls each night after nine o’clock, and most of them are from outsourcing firms in some other part of the world whose telephone sales reps barely speak English as a 2nd language; if Jigsaw helps any of these people make better decisions about when and how to make their sales pitch to me, that’s fine with me.

Whether Jigsaw succeeds as a viable, profitable business remains to be seen; the VC firms who invested $12 million in the firm are presumably a lot more concerned about that than I am. For me, the idea of a community-oriented, Wikipedia-style approach to keeping relatively public information correct, consistent, and up to date seems like a good thing. Jigsaw probably needs to find a way to encourage victims … er, um, sales prospects … like me to proactively update and correct their information (a case of Laphroaig would help!), but the basic approach makes sense to me.