Filed under: Features, News, Web services
Avanoo - Harness the wisdom of communities
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.
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They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
