Illumio to Launch Social Network Advice Software

hdtv writes "The New York Times is reporting that Palo Alto-based Illumio will soon try to figure out the experts among your social network with a new online service." From the article: "Illumio is not a search engine, like Google or Yahoo. The system works by transparently distributing a request for information on questions like "Who knows John Smith?" and "Are Nikon digital cameras better than Olympus?" to the computers in a network of users. The questions can then be answered locally based on a novel reverse auction system that Illumio uses to determine who the experts are."

Comments

Re:Another odd note...

[cgranade]

That does seem very odd. Of further note: the "service" is based on an application that requires Windows XP. Though I imagine it would run under Linux w/ Wine, the default assumption seems to remain that only Windows users are experts. By excluding users of *BSD, Linux, OS X and other OSs, they are dramatically reducing the size of their network, which seems like would only negatively impact the entire project. If they're serious about building a social network, they should either design the frontend to their service in (X)HTML, which has clients under any OS that I can care to name, or they should write versions of the app for all major operating systems at the least. Even using a VM framework like Java or .NET would be better than just leaving all but your pet OS out in the cold.

reminds me of the Usenet Oracle

[Danny Rathjens]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_oracle

Re:Eat shit

[PatrickThomson]

This illustrates an important point about the internet in general. It enables people to only mingle with those similar to them, which is a shame because my most enriching experiences come from a diverse range of different people, coworkers, family, none technically literate. If we are permitted to choose everything we encounter, then life becomes boring and you lose perspective unless you throw in a "surprise me" or two.