User Profiles, Match Technology

Published by Simon on November 4th, 2007

In my continuing efforts to develop unique features for OIOpublisher in its early stages (before it takes off!), for the last couple of days I’ve been working on user profile pages, which you can now view and edit. First off, lets see what one looks like:

http://user.oiopublisher.com/1/simon/

As you can see, it consists of several sections - about me, contact block, personal rss feed, marketplace & job listings, and blogging interests. Whilst the other sections are pretty self-explanatory (customisable through editing), the final section is a little more interesting - at least to me! You list your top 3 blogging niche areas, and others viewing your profile who have also selected their niche interests will be matched against you.

That accounts for the Match Score field you see on the profile page example above. Try logging in and editing your own interests, and then view the page again to see your match score against me. It works very simply, using a combination of primary and secondary matches to produce a score. As time goes on, I’ll introduce other factors into the equation also, but this seemed like a good starting point.

Once your match score has been calculated, there is still one more thing to look at. That’s the Collab Interest field. Each user selects their collaboration threshold, above which other users can make collaboration requests - ideas for joint blogging projects, to help produce better, more sustainable (and profitable!) blogs. Even the big guns like ShoeMoney recognise the need for business partners, and this system will make it easier to achieve that goal.

Although not fully operational, if the Collab Interest field reads yes, you will be able to leave a message on their user profile, containing any initial thoughts. If the user wants to talk further with you, they can use the contact block to do so (through Instant Messenger).

As more ideas or suggestions come to me, I’ll be enhancing the profile pages more, and adding more features.

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One Response to “User Profiles, Match Technology”

  1. SocialSpark, I can do better! | Simon Emery Says:
    November 12th, 2007 at 2:13 am

    [...] an attempt to essentially give bloggers and advertisers more information about each other, through interests, analytics data, and social [...]

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