New Others Online Widget

I’m happy to see an alpha release of our new Others Online widget on Mike’s blog, upper right column. This is simply javascript that pulls relevant people/profiles from the Others Online service, and the publisher has control over who gets listed. They will be able to either:

• Allow the widget to read the page and draw people who are relevant to the content.
• Indicate specific tags which people have associated themselves to. For instance, someone could pull those people/profiles showing an interest in “startups, business, social media, etc.” just as easily as they could pull from their friends on MySpace by indicating “MySpace, [username], etc.”
• Simply indicate their Others Online userID, thereby requesting the widget to show profiles that match their current interests/context.

As the viewer runs their mouse over the widget, a fly-out shows more information on the user, including their Web site links, username, age/gender/location, interests and online status. Each interest is clickable, taking you to a page which shows all people with that interest.

 

The difference is discovery

From SearchEngineLand this post on Beyond Google: Social Media Engines First, Other Search Engines Second points out the essential between social discovery and anti-social search (emphasis mine):

To me, search engines are places where people search, they express an active desire, usually through a keyword search. People don’t go to Digg because they’re looking for something. Instead, they want to discover things, to see what’s new, be entertained. That’s not search.

The unique aspect of OthersOnline as a service is that it truly is discovery, and this discovery happens without having to be on a particular Web site. Through a browser extension and through Web widgets, it is totally user-centric – no matter where you go, there you are.

 

Recent improvements and a small outage

The most visible aspect to the OthersOnline service is the display of people’s pictures and profiles in the browser – through either a toolbar or simple HTML widgets. We’ve been working on tuning the relevance of member profiles that are returned by our ‘profile matching’ Web service. There are a lot of factors that can be considered in the selection and sorting of member profiles and it isn’t always obvious how to put it all together to please the viewers the most. The area we have recently been experimenting with is “how much should recent keywords of others influence the results for the current user?” The more history that is used, the more keywords are available which results in finding more people that are relevant. But with too much history being used the results may be relevant to previous pages and less relevant to the current page, especially when browsing away from one concept and into another.

We’ve examined a few approaches and just yesterday afternoon deployed an update to the profile matching algorithm which seems to provide a noticable improvement to the relevance of the results – there should be a wider selection displayed and there should be more ‘connection words’ displayed that help explain why that particular result was chosen.

That’s the good news! Now for the embarassing news – during the deployment an error crept in which prevented members from logging in. Although it was quickly detected the resolution wasn’t as fast as it should have been and we apologize to everyone that may have encountered this outage.

If you have any questions or suggestions, post a comment or send an email to me (mike@).

 

First!

This is the first post in a hopefully long series where I talk about the fun bits about OthersOnline – the technology, the community, the ups and downs – whatever I like.