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January 9, 2004
SocialGrid: P2P YASNS
Posted by Clay Shirky
SocialGrid: "A Free Dating Service Using Google, Grid Computing, P2P ( Peer-to-Peer ), and a File Sharing Program." What's not to love?
The Goal
We hope to provide a free dating service that is cost-effective and universally appealing. This service, besides being used to find soulmates, could also be used to find lost classmates, roommates, and job listings, including internships. In addition, the technology powering this service will be able to scale up to handle hundreds of millions of members cheaply.
The Solution
Our patent pending Identification Coding System™ defines a person by tagging a distinct code for each member's demographic information and traits onto his/her blog, social network, or personal web page. The final result will be a revolutionary way to search for people using Google and other Internet search engines.
There is a particular kind of madness that imagines that by making everything explicit and universally available, human social patterns can be dramatically improved. I wonder how long it will take until people realize that spam and its conceptual neighbors are not accidental but inevitable uses of social systems, and that a search engine that helps people write queries like, say, "Find all 17 year old girls in a 10 mile radius" is a bad idea.
Comments (5)
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1. John Robb on January 9, 2004 1:24 PM writes...
Demographic info? How useful is that for social networks?
Permalink to Comment2. Jen on January 9, 2004 2:38 PM writes...
Having worked at one of the larger online dating services, I can attest that even an informal focus group conducted with at least one female attendee would have shot this idea in the foot before it left the gate. Beyond the million other things wrong with this idea, one of the crucial problems is that you're not going to get many women embedding their body and facial attractiveness ratings into their webpages. Additionally, few would ever participate in a system that gives them no anonymity. Besides the general embarassment that still exists for many with online dating, women have substantial and legitimate concerns with harassment, angry exes, and stalkers. If dating were just about demonstrating to the world that you were available, surely we would have found a way of solving that problem in the offline world by now (Scarlet letters? Flags?).
Permalink to Comment3. Zbigniew Lukasiak on January 9, 2004 6:57 PM writes...
Patent pending? They patent putting information about me on my personal web page? Or the fact that the information is coded? There are many prior arts: geek code, foaf etc. Or perhaps they patent their special coding? It is a bit trivial.
Permalink to Comment4. Lucas on January 9, 2004 8:31 PM writes...
A good balance point between openness and privacy is pseudonimity with selective disclosure of identity. Many applications could benefit from this policy.
Permalink to Comment5. Numit on February 21, 2004 7:05 AM writes...
Yeeeahd, it's csool
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