The Carry On Life

I’m Launching A Startup Next Year!

So, I’ve obviously missed my posting schedule by two days, but I have a good reason. I swear! I’ve been working on a startup with my friend Flip Stewart. Saturday night, my friend and I opened alpha registration for Osmoar. We’ve been working really hard on this project for our Alpha launch of January 1st. Osmoar is a social network for suggestions. Think Last.FM, but for everything. Kind of. You’ll be able to inventory your belongings, which are themselves tagged with other things, creating a free-form association hierarchy. From that, we calculate your interests. E.g., you add For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe and The Importance of being Earnest  and you have indirectly expressed an interest in books, as presumably all three of those would be tagged with “Book”.

This data will give us a number of interesting ways to interpret it. We can suggest more things to you, based on the things you already have and the things people like you have, but that’s not too exciting. We’ll also be making note of activities (think status updates) that those items are involved in. From that, we can start to suggest things you might like to do based on what you already own. E.g., if you have a bike in your inventory you may receive a suggestion to ride Critical Mass around the last Friday of the month. That’s a pretty basic suggestion, but as we’ve seen in any user-driven site, everything ends up getting thought of. Having specific combinations of items will garner you different suggestions, and hopefully users will be trying new things they never thought to do.

This gets even more interesting when you throw geo-location location in there. This opens up the possibility for users to create specific events. E.g., the Halloween Critical Mass in Atlanta. Then users who have a bike in their inventory (and maybe a costume!) and have indicated they are in Atlanta via status update, or any other feature that updates their location may get a suggestion that they attend.

The previous example is one angle to vie the ‘associator engine’ at work. A very broad usage. However, we’re hoping to produce very personalized content. Another user might have a very niche interest in our network: recipes. One could post a recipe as a note, tagging all the necessary ingredients, as well as ethnicity, “spicy”, etc. Then, if another user were to have a similar interest in the site and were to inventory the contents of their pantry, and amongst the things in it are the ingredients to the first user’s recipe, they may receive a suggestion for it.

Anyway, I’ve got lots of work to do in order to keep caught up with work and this project, so I must wrap this post up. If my quick description sounded interesting, go register and invite a friend, follow us on Twitter, and check out our Facebook. I appreciate it.