OthersOnline, the service that lets you network with people based on your interests, opened up its widget service and Firefox toolbar to public yesterday. OthersOnline toolbar brings up people with similar web surfing habits as yours and gives you options to contact them via chat/email or add them to your network. When you mouseover the OthersOnline toolbar, the service will show matching profiles from around the globe or those which are within 50 miles of your location.
OthersOnline widget works in quite an interesting way as compared to MyBlogLog. Instead of users joining your community, you can create a widget by choosing keywords that match your blog or site. This in turn pulls up matching user profiles from Othersonline and shows them on your blog. To better associate users with your blog, you can add specific keywords, like “StartupSquad” for me, to the widget so that only the people interested in your site show up. However I think it will be a pain for users to add new keywords to their profile all the time, which most of us give up sooner or later.
There are lots of chances of spamming the OthersOnline service. Spammers can easily create profiles and add very broad ranging keywords like Technology, mobile, blogging to start appearing everywhere on the web. I already saw couple of fake profiles pointing to some work from home scam sites.
Aside from OthersOnline, Medium and few more services operate in this emerging space of bringing together unknown people or letting them interact when they are at a particular webpage. Yahoo public chat rooms have been providing similar service of hooking up unrelated people for years. How much success has that been? Personally I don’t have the time, energy, and desire to interact with each and every person having “web20″ keyword in his her profile, but would consider those having “StartupSquad” keyword. If Othersonline can make this process of adding new keywords easy, I might consider Othersonline for my blog.
Links:
OthersOnline
March 14, 2007 at 10:55 am |
[...] Original post by Vivek and software by Elliott [...]
March 14, 2007 at 7:49 pm |
Hi Vivek, Jordan from Others Online here. You raise a couple of great points.
We know people will game the system. In fact, we’re building into our model the ability for people to influence their own rank in the system. If we do it right, then it’s hugely viral. If we never planned for it, then at some point we’ll spend all our time fighting it. That said, we’re not done with the profile matching/ranking algorithms yet — we’re getting attention sooner than we intended/wanted actually.
Another thing is — the “spamming” is all very targeted anyway. Like buying keywords on Google, you can’t broadcast to everyone. Also, users can block other users if it becomes a problem.
To your point on keywords, we agree. We have plans to make keyword additions ridiculously easy. Another “not done yet”, but we’re I’m really excited about it. Stay tuned!