Dave Morin, Pair co-founder said, Pair is the social media “bedroom” to Path’s social media “home” to Facebook’s social media “city”. In essence, the current social networks have quite successfully ported the interactions that we have with people we know to the digital world. But life also has another component: the interaction we have with complete strangers.
Who is then building the places where we can converse with strangers meaningfully, yet, in a fun filled way?
Certainly not Omegle. The first question on Omegle is still “asl?” or “age sex location?”. It is the most discouraging conversation starter that I can possibly think of. But, the users don’t have any options either. We are anonymous, we are strangers.
IMVU? Maybe, yes. If I would have wanted a virtual date, but for a meaningful conversation. No, and never.
What Wikipedia did to e-information world, what Quora is trying to do to the questions, someone needs to do the same to ‘virtual interactions’ world. In real life, we spend a considerable amount of time talking with strangers, knowing new places. There is a natural human curiosity to know things, and a desire to converse meaningfully with other humans.
So here comes the challenge. How do we solve this problem? We want strangers to interact amongst them safely, yet, maintain that the quality of interaction is high. This can only be done if the users have a sense of reputation. In a non-anonymous world like Facebook, users have their real-life identity attached to their profile, which makes them behave properly.
Zumbl.com aims to be a social network for strangers. Enjoying the freedom of anonymity, one can enjoy chatting with strangers. Our algorithm matches you up with other people you are more likely to enjoy a conversation with. This is based on your interests, and your history of chats. A powerful information retrieval algorithm tries to extract the emotion contained in a chat message and animates the avatar for emphasis. You can also rate, and tag the stranger you chatted with. The tags a user receives becomes his virtual identity. To share a video, just enclose the name within < and >, voila we search for it, and pop it up on your chat screen.
