If I’ve not bent your ear about PeopleJar yet, here’s a sporting tweak. First, let me say that I’ve long been a fan of LinkedIn, and with Facebook I’ve not had such a candy store kid’s jones for a pop culture phenom since maybe the launch of the Nintendo game system (old school, mid ’80s). Wait, no, that’s dating me, slightly. Fast-forward to last year’s release of the 1st-gen iPhone … I would smackdown a grizzly in a cage fight before I’d go without my iPhone for any longer than it takes to Shazam a Foo Fighters riff, especially since I recently discovered mobile Pandora … and UrbanSpoon … and LED Football … and VNC … and Ambiance …
Anyway, it’s not on the shoulders of this blog to open the kimono on the Social Web. If you’re here you’re already marching to the beat of that drum and have likely burned your retinas plenty of late nights pondering the promise of Web 2.0. Next in the spotlight: PeopleJar, with Alex Alexandrov, a posterboy wunderkind if I’ve ever met one, at the helm of a little engine that could and, I think, most certainly will be white hot news by Spring ’09 (just around the corner, folks).
What is it? Maybe it’s easiest to first reference the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn since that’s what most people think of as “people” sites. They’re great. Totally. I’m hooked. But the curiously overlooked niche, the Next Big Thing that’s missing from both — and MySpace, and even Google and Yahoo etc., although those are web-crawling search engines, completely different animals — is a wiki platform to offer a robust and dynamic search engine by the people, for the people (and justice for all).
Better yet, users (notably also people) should be able to create their own search parameters, e.g., skydiver, 5′ 10″, favorite movie is Blade Runner, and even (drum roll) … recently spilled a green tea latte on his white Lacoste shirt at Starbucks on Little Santa Monica Blvd, etc.. Seriously, why shouldn’t we be able to search this way? Well, we can. And will. And that’s the mission (and supporting tech and algorithms) of PeopleJar.
In context, what eBay is to product search and Wikipedia is to information search PeopleJar is to, well, people search. All three are user-generated, guided, developed, enhanced and grown. All three are mass collaboration models that are beautifully amorphous, cloudlike but tentacular, spidering out into countless directions. All three have chameleon brands and hot magma cores.
So Alex and the people behind PeopleJar have set the controls for the heart of the sun with a plan to provide the world’s first universal people search, as well as unify members of disparate portals, enable users to create their own portals and perhaps even provide some additional connective tissue between the Facebook’s, MySpace’s, Classmates.com’s, OneModelPlace’s, etc. Above all, it’s to connect people in totally new ways that are determined, defined and deployed (again, wiki power) by the people themselves.
There are about 2 billion Internet users worldwide, with a multitude of individual interests, and many if not most of them are eager to quickly, easily and positively connect with other like-minded people. The permutations of possible nodes to connect are mind-boggling. To quote the Beijing Olympics one last time before I mothball those NBC-branded memories … One World, One Dream. And definitely worth checking out … www.peoplejar.com.
Posted by: Colin Mangham