RSS
Mechanical Zoo - Social Networking Brilliancy or Just Monkey Business?
By Joseph Hunkins at April 22, 2008 0 CommentsMechanical Zoo has an impressive startup team include Google News product lead Nathan Stolle. The concept, according to Zoo member Ventilla quoted at CNET:
… tackling the problem of subjective search–when no one answer would satisfy everyone–and the answer is not to serve a Web page,” Ventilla said in an interview. “We’ve developed an online social structure that lets users reach out to people they already know” for answers.
Integrating social networking into the search experience seems to be one of the most promising ways to solve several problems with the search applications of today. Even just the power of social environments (like Digg) to help eliminate spammy entries from search results has obvious potential to improve the search landscape. A robust social network where users are interacting not only with respect to quality websites and blogs but actually generating content to answer questions would be a strong offering.
Mechanical Zoo is not alone in this quest and some would argue that services like Yahoo Answers have already built this type of environment. Unfortunately for Yahoo, Answers appears to have been more successful as a question and answer environment rather than as a thriving social network. Can Mechanical Zoo bridge that gap?
Disclosure: Long on YHOO
Labels: mechanical zoo, Yahoo
