Avanoo - Harness the wisdom of communities

Filed under: Features, News, Web services

Avanoo - Harness the wisdom of communities

by Grant Robertson May 14th 2007

Avanoo is a brand-spanking new community wisdom mining system that may one day knock your socks off with its ability to gain insight into tough questions. We've got 100 public beta invites to throw our readers so, hop in and comment on the Wisdom of Communities to get your ticket to ride!

Social news has been all the rage among the tech-savvy but, it's failed to hit home with the everyman. Digg and Reddit are massively popular with the geek set -- the place to be if you want to know what a tech heavy male between 18 and 24 thinks -- but, what about everyone else?

Enter Avanoo. Not a social news site, not really a social networking site, Avanoo is something different. Collecting the wisdom of its community, Avanoo is poised to give you some amazing insight into what everyone thinks, or what a tiny demographic based slice of everyone thinks.

It works like this; Avanoo users ask questions with finite numbers of answers, which are then posed to the community of Avanoo users. Answers are collected and available for the community to view. Simple enough? Sure, but this is where it starts to become seriously cool. In the style of "give a little to get a little", Avanoo users can mine the polling data they've helped create by giving a little data of their own. Want to know how 18-24 year olds felt? Give your own age. Want to know how people with an income below $30,000/year feel? Give your own income.

Avanoo's president Dan Jacobs tells me it's all about perspective, "The wisdom of crowds fails because the crowd has no perspective, the wisdom of experts fails because the expert doesn't share your perspective." Avanoo essentially allows you to define the perspective, "the lens" if you will, through which you want to view the world; Something that a whole host of social news sites have failed to do.

The brilliance in Avanoo is its simplicity; it's an idea which makes you smack your head and wonder, "Why didn't I think of that." Avanoo enters public beta today, and anticipates that it will soon be open to in excess of 10,000 users.

Gallery: Avanoo

Tags: Avanoo, community sites, CommunitySites, demogrpahic mining, DemogrpahicMining, not so social networking, NotSoSocialNetworking, social news, SocialNews, wisdom of communities, WisdomOfCommunities

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)

St3phen said 12:26PM on 5-14-2007

I wouldn't mind trying this out....

Brian said 12:28PM on 5-14-2007

This sounds interesting. I'll give it a shot.

KLM said 12:32PM on 5-14-2007

Sounds interesting. I'll give it a try.

Chris said 12:40PM on 5-14-2007

Throw me an invite!

Richard Lankford said 12:42PM on 5-14-2007

I would like an invite, please.

panthar said 12:44PM on 5-14-2007

This looks like a great resource - I would love to try it out!

esca said 12:44PM on 5-14-2007

i would also like an invite please.

Theodore Carras said 1:00PM on 5-14-2007

I'd also quite like an invite, thanks.

Rob Stevens said 1:04PM on 5-14-2007

Could be useful for a college student ... inexpensive market research, though the reliability might need to be proven.

Ixnay said 1:05PM on 5-14-2007

This looks pretty cool, can't wait to get my hands on this and see how it works.

Spencer Rosengarten said 1:08PM on 5-14-2007

If this takes off, I can see it being absorbed by the Googleplex. I'll take an invite, too, please :-)

Spencer

Gary Hodgson said 1:17PM on 5-14-2007

Sounds interesting, can I have an invite please?

Aaron Hallam said 1:20PM on 5-14-2007

Oh, that looks like it could be very cool.

I'd like an invite, please.

Mike S. said 1:21PM on 5-14-2007

Love an invite

Hani said 1:22PM on 5-14-2007

Sounds new and interesting, would love to try it.

BoZs13 said 1:23PM on 5-14-2007

Throw me an invite...looks interesting!

dzappone said 1:27PM on 5-14-2007

This sort of reminds me of John Brunner's Oracle Pool.

"First you corner a large - if possible, a very large - number of people who, while they've never formally studied the subject you're going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic which followed World War I...

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statical returns.

It's rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while nobody knows what's going on around here, everybody knows what's going on around here.

Well, if it works for the past, why can't it work for the future? Three hundred million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees."

John Brunner, Shockwave Rider 1975

I'd love to check Avanoo out so count me in please.

Brad said 1:34PM on 5-14-2007

I'd really like an invite!

kitsilanoguy said 1:39PM on 5-14-2007

throw me an invite pls

dp said 1:55PM on 5-14-2007

I want to ask interesting questions! May I have an invitation too?

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