SoWeSay – Rating Humanity

SoWeSay.com is the first symbiotic social network that allows users to create profiles, rate and review anyone else.

You could describe it as a Hot or Not but after interviewing one of the two founder's Alexander Chung, who are Yahoo Alumni, you can read that there is more to it. As with all these kinds of services you would expect a little disruption of the network with unwanted elements especially when it comes to rating people and leaving comments behind. { check the embeddable widget below }

How did you decide that there was a need for this kind of a service?

The idea for the company came about from three personal experiences/problems that I was experiencing that I thought needed improvement.

First, in the past, I have often "Googled" people that I might meet or have interactions with in daily life.  However, I always found the process very hit or miss in terms of the information that I would find.  So I liked the idea of searching for people to find information about them but was not getting satifactory results.

Second, I like many people have gotten excited about social networking and I have been meeting many more new people online than every before, but I have found that the only information about all of these new 'friends' is what they decided to publish on their own profile. Earlier this year in fact, when I was searching for a new roomate on Craigslist, I found that many people search for a roommate were using a link to their Myspace pages as a reference. So, after a while, most of these pages seemed very 'propoganda' like in nature and quite misleading.

Third, I think the best reference method for anyone is word of mouth recommendations (very much like anything else these days) and I could not find a place on the web that easily pulled together that type of knowledge on people.

Do you see it marketable to today's web audience?

Yes. Social networking is enabling people to share and meet so many new people each day, but we have very little information to go on to help us navigate all of these new relationship. With SoWeSay.com people have a forum to share and learn about anyone that impacts their lives.

Is there any other way you plan to monetize this other than PPC ads?

Yes, there are several premium features that will be released later this year for users.

Is this the new way to rate Hot or Not?

I think Hot or Not is a great service, but from what I have read it was initially planned as a dating service based almost solely on looks and had very little collective audience knowledge.

SoWeSay is much more dynamic and factors in many different types of relationship that a person may have in life.  SoWeSay acknowledges that there are some relationships that are purely online such as having an online gamer buddy on xBox Live or a virtual friend in Second Life.  The goals of SoWeSay profiles for the reader is to learn about that person in a more wholistic and unedited fashion to help them with any type of relationship.

I guess ultimately most of these services either fall prey to unwanted members or the service finds a way to circumvent spam/bad behavior. A case is digg where gaming the system can be quite easy if you know how, but the team is always "tweaking" their algo to be on top of the gamers, while the community "nukes" { buries } the spammers.

Let's hope that SoWeSay also keeps "tweaking" and the community keeps "nuking". Except I don't see a way to either report or flag a user for such behavior on SoWeSay, they may have to address that soon in the future.

SoWeSay EverybodyGoTo SoWeSay.

Press Release.

Technorati Tags: sowesay, web 2.0, social networks,

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