Lovest.at: ‘Like this person? Check out these users too.’
Written on March 1, 2008 – 2:04 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Lovest.at is a site that matches you with persons similar to you, in terms of interests and social connections. When they launched a few months ago, the service wasn’t particularly well-designed and hard to understand. That has now changed, since the team has launched a new and ‘more robust’ version. Moreover, they’ve added some new functionalities that help you to see the links between social networks AND claim to have developed the Beacon killer. I’ve talked to founder Jack Thorogood to hear the background story.
Thorogood believes that people want to find their Internet twin: “I’ve been convinced for over two years now that there would be real value in a service that really allows users to find the people most similar to themselves on the known Internet; to find their doppelganger. So we have been building an engine that can help any Internet user find the people in the world most similar to themselves. It sounds like an odd thing to do, but the social potential of it is vast, if slightly scary. At the moment, online and off line relationships normally occur as a result of chance. We want to make identifying a kindred spirit a straightforward matter rather than a case of finding a needle in the proverbial haystack.”
“Now that we’ve built the fundamentals of the engine that drives Lovest.at, we’ll be applying it to tackle a variety of scenarios where knowing a bit more relevant information about the people around you could be particularly interesting. Imagine knowing who in the gym shares almost identical interests as you, or which visitors to your blog are also your virtual twin. This is exciting for users, but also of huge value to advertisers. The benefit to advertisers isn’t about compiling more and more information about people; instead it’s about identifying who a brand’s existing customers are and then targeting, as prospective clients, those people who are most similar to these existing customers. Theoretically these should be the the low hanging fruit in terms of customer acquisition.”
So how should people use Lovest.at in the context of their social networks. Naturally, it has several aggregator functionalities, yet other services offer these as well - often better-looking. So what’s the advantage here? (more…)
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