Allen of GlobeAlive argues that “we have fine search engines for documents, but not for people.”
People aren’t searchable. They’re the most important resource in the world, and they re not searchable, they’re scattered to the wind. There’s no “people” tab at Google (and “groups” isn t the idea at all). That person you want to talk to right now (and that wants to hear from you right now) that needle in the haystack of 6 billion, is out there, I promise, but you ll never find them, because the magnet you need to do so doesn’t exist. I want to build it.
The bottom line is that when we restrict our interactions to people we already know or the people that happen to be in the chat room or community we join, it’s like restricting our information-gathering to the books in our personal libraries at home, it’s a mathematical certainty that were selling ourselves utterly short. The island mentality is the root of this problem. Theres an infinitely better way of going about our interpersonal interactions. It would change the web by making it live; it would change the economy by making it personal; it would change the world by making it smaller; and it would change you and I… by helping us meet.
I think we should connect with Allen. We had started BlogStreet with a similar goal – using weblog analytics to help us connect to the experts. More than just documents and information, we are searching for people. That’s the missing Web.
