Main effort is still design. Efforts this month met with conflicting responses: “uninspiring” and “simple is good”.
With traditional search “salsa dancing Kensington last Tuesday guy in red shirt at the bar” is unlikely to return a meaningful result, no matter how many people use it. With search-on-search, the next person who searches for say “Kensington salsa Tuesday red shirt white socks” will find a meaningful result and, in consequence, make the first person’s saved search meaningful.
My interest is in social applications but there may be other problems search-on-search may solve. I know, from speaking to an ex-Detective Inspector, that the Metropolitan Police have an application that uses something like search-on-search on their intranet. Helps them solves crimes.
Found a paper by a guy I saw in the Royal Society called Martin A. Nowak, a mathematical biologist. He talked about indirect reciprocity. Here is a key line from the paper:
In a fluid population, in which most of the interactions are anonymous and people have no possibility of monitoring the social score of others, indirect reciprocity has no chance. In a socially viscous population, in which people know each other’s reputation, cooperation by indirect reciprocity can thrive.
In other words, indirect reciprocity cannot thrive in modern society and, therefore, neither do the feelings and behaviors that it induces.
Spotted a competitor to the groups application. It’s called GroupsNearYou.com:
Spotted new competitor to Look2Look called Icebrkr.com (see scan below). Same problems and solutions I had on launch. Thanks to Patrick for spotting the article in FT Money. Here is how they describe their technique:
- Arrive at a bar for a drink with your friends.
- See someone you fancy?
- Click on the SMS we sent you for instant access to our mobile Internet site.
- Browse photos of other members in the very same bar as you.
- Found the person you fancy?
- Click their photo to send them a friendly message.
- If they reply ‘yes’ then go over for a chat.
