Geelong, Australia based Tinfinger has launched in beta today with a user-generated “omnibus” of famous and well known people. The site combines user-authored encyclopedic profile pages of famous people, some social networking aspects, a revenue share model and aggregated news.
People in Tinfinger’s database are sorted via a top-down category structure and a flat tag structure with tags “being expressible as RDF triples (subject-predicate-object, as opposed to subject-object).” Wikipedia style the service offers stubs of 150 words on celebrities who do not yet have a full profile on the site, that can be edited and added to by TinFinger users.
Tinfinger’s “clustered news aggregation” offers “front pages” for 650 categories in a similar fashion to Google News but notably with data pulled by its own news and blog search engine. Tinfinger does not use links or semantic connections to cluster; just names, using a publicly available algorithm called tinscore.
On the social networking side, Tinfinger is using tech from PeopleAggregator to allow user interaction including groups for each category or user generated groups.
I spoke to Tinfinger CEO Paul Montgomery prior to launch; the site has taken over two years to get to this stage and aside from the social networking side it’s exclusively powered by their own code and engine. It’s a tough market, particularly with Google set to launch Knol later this year but Montgomery argues that the strength of Tinfinger is its narrow focus and says that Tinfinger will be to Who’s Who what Wikipedia was to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Any user generated content site is only as good as the contributions made by users, however the transparent revenue sharing model combined with a focus on a hot vertical (celebrities) may tide it well going forward, particularly in tapping into the celebrity obsessed mainstream.
Probably more than 100 user-profile-CENTRIC services coming up in 2008
The internet is getting boring in 2008
I do not see really the clou at this service. About everybody in this who is who is a better article in wikipedia. Looks for me more like a SEO inspirated experiment. But maybe the sence is deeper then I can go.
What’s wrong with Wikipedia and IMDB?
I guess that it’s the news feed, which people love (like a daily gossip feed), no?
2 years to do this, ouch
I thought Tinfinger was supposed to be a TechMeme killer?
What RDF triple store are they using?
If you check out the Technology headlines page, Michael, that’s the Techmeme-ish feature.
http://www.tinf...ines/Technology
Plus there are another 650 or so pages like that for different categories. None of them are at Techmeme levels of quality yet, but we’ll iterate and iterate just like Gabe did when he started, and hopefully we’ll get there.
Raj, at the moment we’re using our own MySQL store, but in future we intend to publish data in raw RDF triples every so often, in the manner of how dbpedia is a dump of Wikipedia data.
It’s a good one. thanks cruch
It could be something – at first there can be only celebrities and after they will add a profile section – and in the end we can find this new site as a new linkedin or social network
Paul,
I don’t know how this comment system works (I posted comments withy URIs earlier). Anyway, see Linking Open Data Community page (just google the search pattern).
You can also find me (LinkedIn, Facebook, Google etc. easily via my Name (I dare not place my personal linked data URI in this thread just in case it invalidates this attempt to comment).
Kingsley Idehen
Kingsley, I remember your name from my research into semantic web materials. I will definitely try to conform to Linked Data norms when publishing Tinfinger data.
Congrats on the launch Paul. I know the site has been a long time in development, and it’s good to see it officially launch now.
how does this really differ from spock.com?
What is the difference of this and WikiYou and Spock?
Jason and antje: Spock searches through social networks to create its database, which is much like a White Pages directory. We search through news and blogs only, plus user submissions, which means our database is more like Wikipedia in that it only contains notable people.
Gender equality emphasizes on bringing equality among men and women. Gender equality also highlights encouraging equal and active participation from women and men in making decisions.
From what I have seen so far … you better reserve a place in the Deadpool. Utterly pointless.
I am also not very sure about the content, info about famous people. I also think the UI was a bit non-intuitive.. Took me some time figuring out whats happening around. But I like the idea about tagging profiles using RDF.
Paul so yours is discriminatory and wikiyou and this one are for the peons
Aren’t most “notable” people already on Wikipedia though?
The site looks interesting. It is nice to see and Australian based site targetting a global audience.
It depends on what you mean by “notable”, antje. We’re going to be more forgiving in our notability criteria that Wikipedia, but less forgiving than Wikiyou. And better quality than either.
Beyond the name of the company, this is so boring and un-innovative it brings tears to my eyes.
Please. This is a url looking for a service. If this is the best you can come up with after 2 years of development Paul, it’s probably time to hang up your hat. Also Duncan, posting about your mate’s lame web service is seriously a new low that you’ve sunk to.
???????????????????
two years to do this? did they recruit at the special olympics? wow another pile of pointlessness.
As I said earlier: it’s not perfect by any means now, but I promise to iterate and iterate, and by the time I’m satisfied with every part of the site being mature, we’ll go gold.
Jason wrote: I guess that it’s the news feed, which people love (like a daily gossip feed), no?
That in itself will not make this site a success. Particularly when IE 7 can’t even detect a feed on a famous person profile page.
Our experience indicates that the vast majority of mainstream users don’t really know what RSS is (assuming that’s what you are referring to when you say “new feeds”).
While techies and highly web savvy people such as the TechCrunch audience love RSS, it just hasn’t caught on in the wider community. To put this into perspective, of the 10,000+ subscribers to 2 of our sites, less than 2% use RSS, the rest use email.
That said, our audience would be 21 year olds and upwards. Maybe a younger audience might user RSS more.
A cursory search for a famous person leaves me with the impression that the content quality is very poor. For example, the page for Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of the UK is out of date (says he is Chancellor of the Exchequer) and what is there doesn’t read well at all, in fact some of it doesn’t even make sense.
Ironically the Google ads on the site were more up to date and relevant than the TinFinger content. Not compelling at all at this stage.
Celebrity obsessed?
TV is celebrity obsessed, and so are the magazines at the supermarket counter.
Ordinary people aren’t. If you look at the AOL search data or a random sample of a million blog posts, celebrities barely register. Yes, some people are interested in celebrities, but they’re also into Halo 3 and thumbtacks, playing games online, etc. In a sample of livejournal blogs I looked at, there was about as much interest in Paris Hilton as there is in Plato.
to Paul Montgomery
1) a general question- why it wasn’t enough Wikipedia? the project with proven record as a Web Encyclopedia, at least for those known and famous… It wasn’t enough Wikipedia for the NORMAL people, so here has arrived Spock. but nobody had problems I believe with the celebrities’ stories on the Web
2) about Spock:
- why did you decide that Spock searches ONLY on Social Networks? (as from your response to “Jason and antje”)
I think it was clear for everyone that Spock checks Web 2.0 for the Web 2.0 people, and of course it looks at the normal Web for the non Web 2.0 people!
so:
a) as far as I know, wikipedia, the world’s largest DB about all known and famous people, have been already processed by Spock- that means Spock already has everyone listed on Wikipedia.
do you wanna say us Tinfinger will beat wikipedia first of all?
- you say this new Who’s Who can search the Blogs and so on- well, Spock can search everything that’s on the Web. If Google “knows something”- so also Spock will
do you wanna say us Tinfinger will beat Google after it beats Wikipedia?
hm… I have a doubt sincerely. About the mission first of all- it was probably enough Wikipedia for us + it was really needed to add the Web 2.0 part that has been done by Spock…
Well, good luck however!
Kind Regards,
Andrey Golub- find me on Spock
http://www.spoc...om/Andrey-Golub
Andrey, I have responded to you on my blog:
http://tinfinge...b-spocks-1.html
Thank you Paul, I’ll check it now.
An “Open Letter”… hm, have I become a celebrity now?:) pretty funny
have you guys seen chickipedia?
never see it since i am new here…i will check it soon