Seattle based OthersOnline is launching a new attention based social networking service today. Run through an IE toolbar on Windows machines, OthersOnline will show you users related to yourself via their web surfing habits mixed with user profiles. Contextual advertising from Kanoodle will be mixed in with the list of related users.
You’ll be able to see when related people are available online and connect with them by email or IM. Anonymous accounts are available for people interested in that approach. Recommended contacts are split into global and local recommendations, based on the zip code in your profile. Friends can be added to a favorites list for easy IM contact at any time.
Users are also allowed to erase their browsing history, in case you don’t want to meet other people who like…digg for example! Well, you can imagine. That would make sense if you could erase just a part of that history, but as an all or nothing feature it’s clumsy at best. There is a special section for profiles marked “adult.”
Will this work? I don’t know, but it’s interesting. Will strangers seek each other out based on common surfing habits? Will this turn into just another space for a large number of men to harrass a large number of women and and a small number of women with webcams to go nuts? If multiple people could communicate at the same time like a perma-IRC, if users could see who was on a page in real time or if other community discourse was possible then this might strike me as more likely to take off. But that’s just my take on it personally; there may be a simple beauty with enough safeguards to make this mass market viable.
The company says it’s like “Google for people,” a real time shopping community and a way to take your MySpace relationships out into the rest of the web. Despite the hype of those terms, that sounds like an accurate description of OthersOnline and I think people just might go for it.
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This is such a brilliant Idea -
it ireally is surprising that no one thought of this before….Many Geeks would really like to met others that have similar web surfing tastes as theirs
and the good thing about this firm, is that they anticipate the privacy concerns - and will allow users to address them (there may be sites you visit that you would NOT want to meet others from) :LOL
digg.com/software/Social_Networking_TOOLBAR_Matches_Surfers_by_Keywords_Sites_They_Use/
we definitely need something better than what’s available so far in the ‘attention direction’ space or whatever we’re calling it. so far, combing through sites like popurl is a complete waste.
and i don’t know if i’ll ever be into rss feeds and all that mess. for me, style is substance. i’ll leave the rss feeds to the that loser Rummy and his ever-growing cadre of spooks. i want colors! i want flash! i want something to move me.
i want to know what these people are looking at:
* open-minded (really open-minded)
* 25-45
* english-speaking, but international
* male/female
* politically committed/active
* pro-democracy
* tech savvy
* extremely good-looking
well, we weren’t all blessed, now were we.
I’ve thought for a long-time that “clickstream dating” would be an interesting attention-monitoring application. “Who’s visiting what I’m visiting?” and “Who’s visiting this set {} of 10 sites?” are questions that could lead you to interesting people.
I’m interested to see how others take this…
Would you let someone aggregate and share your attention data with interested parties?
IE only? Probably no matches for me then. Or for 90% of Techcrunch’s readers.
If you’re looking to see and chat with people who are viewing a site, then check out Lluna at http://www.lluna.de/. It’s an IE plugin that gives people an avatar overlaid on a site and allows them to chat. If you’re motivated you could develop your own version (for Firefox) by using the Virtual Presence Jabber Enhance Proposal at http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0151.html.
Jesus! No joke - but I had this idea and was doing this for my uni project in 2003! It’s uncanny, mine worked in exactly the same way. Unbeleivable. Always ahead of my time, but lazy.
Cool idea but I agree with stiant, no matches for me as I only use IE for testing purposes.
Sounds good on first thought but majority of users prefer to keep their surfing interests private and then when you throw in the additional complexity of dealing with when to erase surfing history and when not to as well as dealing with anonymous accounts, that pretty much kills the desire to even try it for the majority.
There were similar offerings as this in the late 90s but they never caught on and it seems many of these failed ideas from the last bubble are being repackaged and marketed in todays social net bubble…
A user surfs for many different interests. We all have many faces or roles. If I surfed for dresses for my wife, hair loss products (not that I need it), and the israeli-arab conflict. Who would that hook me up with? A bold, cross-dressing arab man or a hairless jewish woman? They need to weigh heavily on your profile or need to segment the surfing data or both.
I sat down with a VC and his assistant 2 years ago to discuss this exact idea, and thought it was the worst idea ever. People tend to use the web for a small number of activities, which do not accurately portray their personality/identity. I think forums already work well enough for people who want to talk about specific interests, and as a dating service this would only appeal to a small niche.
I certainly thought it was interesting when I first heard the idea, but I shot a bunch of holes in it. I wish them success, and I’m curious to see how well it will do.
This is a StumbleUpon clone, right?
Others Online isn’t so much about matching users based on the sites or pages they visit (though we can do that), but rather the relevant keywords that represent that content. Think of it as a real-time intersection of users’ “personal tagclouds”, which are based on (a) their current browsing context (changes every pageview), (a) their implicit interests (they keep going to a page where the keyword “World Cup” surfaces, so eventually we associate them to that keyword), and (c) their explicit interests (which persist).
We match people in that order too. So if you are into “hiking, clubs, poetry” and you’re on Ebay looking at “iPod nano”, then we’ll connect you with others across the Web whose personal tagcloud also contains “iPod nano, hiking, clubs, poetry”, regardless of what site they’re on.
This toolbar is just the start. Our focus is on building a “people service” for the Web — an opt-in directory of people and their links, presence, and personal tagclouds, for social discovery, self-promotion, or whatever else people think of. We’ll soon have a search function on our Web site, but we’re definitely more into partnering with social networks than competing. The whole thing is Web servicable so that Web and software publishers can tap into it. In fact, we’re talking to a number of large Web communities about private-labeling their own toolbar so they can persist the value of their community over users’ entire online experience. Users like it, and we can offer these companies 2-3x their ad revs per user, increased pageviews, a behavioral profile of their user base and for some, decreased blog abandonment.
You can get more inside my head by reading my blog. Yes, we’ll do a version for Firefox (interested in partnering with me on that, anyone?), and we’re talking to Flock too.
Jordan, those per user revenue potentials sound compelling, the question is can you aggregate a significant amount of users to make it worthwhile for those community sites and you need to figure out an effective method to keep spammers from driving users away from such service…
Another gimmicky service that will fail to become a viable business on any larger scale. Ping Liang’s comments are dead on. Ashish is dead on - there are already sites that are much more purpose-focused (forums, dating sites) and enable people to actually get to know each other on a deeper level. Somehow it’s a little creepy to think of having someone approach me and saying “Hey I saw you were browsing VictoriasSecret.com. I like that site too. Wanna chat?” Most people do not want their surfing habits tracked. There are already very efficient ways to meet people with similar interests online. Successful businesses are built around filling a need that isn’t being met. This service doesn’t add anything compelling and the model has a lot of problems.
Also, any business that needs to reference a silly word like “tagcloud” is doomed. It might not be a funny word to bubbleheads, but ask any real consumer on the street and their response will be “What the hell is a tagcloud?”
“George Grinsted of the Royal College of Art in London had Yahoo techies admiring his creation, Chatsum, which enabled Internet users to chat with anyone else who happened to be visiting the same website as them.
A graphics program generated an atlas with arcing red lines linking the cities of those chatting via instant text messages.
‘It helps you understand the world better by talking to people all over,’ Grinsted said. ‘What are the similarities between me and someone in China? We look at the same website.’”(Glenn Chapman) Wed Aug 2, 1:04 PM ET
I found this article on the front page of digg ironically. I write ironically because digg as the tech crunch article pointed out is in the same “social net bubble.” lol
The comments section of this post leads one to believe that the idea does not have a good track record. Still Michell might be onto something if he got Facebook or MySpace to buy his service and instantly expose a massive audience to the idea. I’m not so sure about the aggregating dating data bull shit, but chatting to someone on the same webpage would be simple and pleasant.
A question for Tone, what would be the incentive for spammers to flood the OthersOnline network with phonny folk? E-mail spam, blog spam, and pay-per-click fraud are all profit driven scams. Where would a zombie network profit from spamming OthersOnline? Note that I’m not condeming your comment, I’m just curious where the spam leaks are in the OthersOnline system and what will drive the flow of spam into their system.
Good luck Jordan.
Edourad, any service that allows self-promotion such as this one will drive spammers especially if there is no cost of using it and for this to gain any traction it must be free obviously… now couple that to knowing other surfers immediate interests as this service enables in the form of keywords or whatever and its obvious that this is a goldmine for spammers, they will salivate that they can now send relevant spam unlike in the chat channels for porn links and other crap but it is still spam…
Thanks all for your comments.
Tone, we know there is enough incentive for Web site communities (especially the mid-size ones who generate meager ad revs on untargeted inventory) to partner with us on distribution. Given our approach (keywords vs specific page), we don’t need a lot of users to start making truly relevant connections. Spam is certainly not a problem we face alone; we offer the typical features (such as “block user”), we broker all communications between users so that it’s double-blinded, and we enforce a visible and relevant connection.
Jessica, you’re right — there ARE a lot of sites already. Pick any topic and you’ll see hundreds if not thousands of Web sites. That’s the problem. Let’s say you wanted to talk to someone about “Goldendoodles”, do a search and you’ll get 291,000 results. With Others Online, you see someone online right now (I’m not kidding) that has her picture with a Goldendoodle. I look at her profile and also see we both like hiking and travel. It’s too much work sometimes to comb through all the content of the Web; sometimes you just want to connect with people, not content, and it can be intimidating to jump into an established group or forum. So we’ve made the the intro as warm as we can. Oh, and users CANNOT see what site the other user is on — that would be creepy. And we very tightly control the keywords by which users connect with each other, so it can’t be like “bras, lingerie, …”.
Edouard, I was involved with a company 3 years ago that allowed you to chat with people on the same page as you. We got it up to 500K users and learned a LOT, such as:
- there are way more pages on the web than people. It’s very hard to get critical mass when connecting people by page.
- a page level connection is shallow, in terms of context. People skim the Web and move on. What persists though are the interests that brought them there.
- despite the obvious weird factor that others have pointed out, people actually like to see the others online even if they don’t interact.
All online intention/interest-matching today is hindered by the fragmentation of people and Web sites. If you’re not on the same site or page as me, then I can’t see you. And there’s much more content on the Web than people. Others Online takes a different approach, by first abstracting the people from the content.
First time caller, long time listener ….
It’s clear to me I’m not as technical as most of you are. So many of these posts are all about the gadgets and gizmos, which I think only appeal to a very select few people — not mass market.
Others Online I get though. It’s a simple and clever idea that I think your average social Internet user will appreciate, and it’s certainly unique. Jordan, your goldendoodle example really resonated with me. There is so much effort today around connecting people to relevant content (and ads), but this is the first I’ve seen to connect you to relevant people.
As for the people, seems like anyone with *something* to say would take a couple minutes to put up a profile with some keywords and links their blog, web site, etc. If you have content, it’s just plain hard to compete with all the other content on the Web. Seems like this approach brings your competition down from billions of other pages to just other people.
Jessica, you should look at their website, they don’t mention tagcloud at all.
See message 12. Jordan uses the word tagcloud.
How is your average social internet user going to appreciate this if they even manage to find it? I don’t see it providing anything of such value that I’m going to feel the need to jump on board. I have no problem connecting with relevant people on services I already use…. myspace, linkedin, match.com.
“There is so much effort today around connecting people to relevant content (and ads), but this is the first I’ve seen to connect you to relevant people.” You must be kidding, right? You’re either working for this company or have just started using the net. That’s what **ALL** these social networking services do. MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, hi5. Dating sites like Match.com. There are literally thousands of popular websites that are enabling people to find other relevant people. In all honesty the comment you made is the most ridiculous I’ve ever seen posted here and there is a lot of ridiculous stuff being posted.
It’s rare that I open MSIE these days. I agree with “stiant”.
If there’s really an interest group out there that’s not put together online already, that “place” should be designed specifically for the group’s interests. Maybe some subcultures will adopt this thing, but I doubt it.
This service is not ready for launch. This morning I couldn’t get on because “OO was too busy”. Now I was on and it crashed my brower.
- sort of an interesting concept but it seems poorly executed. I guess it’s harder to scale from 100 users to thousands…
No Firefox? No Netscape? No Flock? No thanks.
Abraham - The reason there are “literally thousands” of relevant websites out there that actual survive is because everyone has the free will to choose the site they prefer. Ridiculous is having a closed mind to any new development when it comes to the web. Next you’ll be saying the internet is just a fad!
As fas as this product goes, when I’m at home my searching and surfing consists of my social interests. When I’m at work my surfing is extremely minimal and my searching is almost exclusively around programming, app dev and work related. If this product could some how bridge the gap and combine my work life w/my home life, I’d be impressed.
And finally - the first time I’d heard about netvibes and del.icio.us I thought they were most ridiculous sites ever. Why on earth would I want to get away from my bookmarks, and anything I ever needed in more than one location went into my webmail for future access. Fast forward and I couldn’t live w/o my netvibes tabs and network on del.icio.us…but I’m still too lazy to dig into anyone outside of my network’s del.icio.us and it sounds like this site will do the work for me.
Oh and just to completely tick everyone off…IE 7.0 beta 3 kicks ass.
There was a quite lovely program from 1996 to 1999 that enabled people to connect with each other through common interest. It was called Firefly. Its light was put out after Microsoft bought it. See http://www.wired.com/culture/l.....9/08/21243.
thanks you’re right. The comments section of this post leads one to believe that the idea does not have a good track record.Others Online takes a different approach, by first abstracting the people from the content.