Finndle.com - Toward a Cyberspace White Pages
The lack of a comprehensive source for contact information represents a drag on commerce and a significant obstacle to communication. The burden of finding and managing contact information weighs against adoption of new communication offers. Finndle.com applies crowd sourcing to create a white pages for Cyberspace. The web app combines guestbook functionality with a mechanism for obtaining introductions and exchanging contacts. Finndle provides websites something like the networking function of a meeting sign-in sheet - an Online Digits Exchange.
Telephone white pages served as the social networking tool of choice before the Internet, but the utility of white pages declined as communication moved to mobile phones and the Internet. The web provides advertisers with options that go beyond traditional yellow pages, but telephone white pages remain the primary source of contact information for the communicating public. Finndle seeks to create a cyberspace white pages by making social networking a feature of websites rather than just a function of sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Traditional telephone directories were possible because telephone companies controlled telephone numbers and forced the publication of listings on an opt-out basis. The element of coercion disappears in the case of the web, so Finndle offers users control over their listing and privacy as an incentive to opt-in to a global directory. Finndle uses the fact a website's audience reflects the content. Finndle treats websites as the cyberspace equivalent of towns in the case of traditional directories.
The Finndle home page aggregates the resulting guestbooks under a search interface. As participation grows, guestbooks develop into local directories and collectively yield a white pages for cyberspace. Listings can include any form of communication or links pointing to profiles created via social networks. Finndle also provides a means for users to create a "SocialID" alias that points to their listing via the Finndle search interface or as a URL of the form www.finndle.com/socialid.
The SocialID reduces the burden of managing multiple communication devices and coordinates. It reduces the leverage service providers obtain from controlling telephone numbers and screen names. Distributing the Finndle SocialID avoids the need to share physical telephone numbers or actual email addresses that tend to change over time. Users can also create different listings and SocialID's for different contexts or even on an adhoc basis for "tonight's party".
Finndle gives websites operators a mechanism to engage and better understand the nature of their audience. The listings (i.e. guestbook signers) form a local directory of the most enthusiastic segment of a website's audience. There exist opportunities to create special offers to incent people to participate and take advantage of the feedback they can provide. Website operators can create subdirectories for various contexts (e.g. events or specific pages) and private invitation only directories. All resulting registrations and listings remain under the control of the host website.
posted by Daniel @ Sunday, October 26, 2008
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