Happy new year to everyone, hope your 2009 is starting off well. I’ve been sick and took some time away from the keyboard and am back and recharged. I have a many posts backed up from over the holidays and other tidbits that I’ll be posting this week.
I heard from Meezoog‘s Erez Mizrachi, who was nice enough to send along details about their new service. Clarification: Tuvia Rosenthal is the CEO.
Meezoog was founded in 2007, raised $320K from private investors, including Dr. Yossi Vardi (Mirabilis – ICQ). Meezoog Alpha was launched on March 2008 with a private international community and expanded by way of invitation. About 200 seed members invited over 3,000 of their friends.
The key differentiator of Meezoog is in the implementation of unique Trust technologies. Meezoog allows virtual strangers to interact with each other in a safer way. Meezoog utilizes an innovative algorithm engine to calculate a set of “social trust” measurements (patent pending).
Today we’re on the verge of launching Meezoog Beta, which will be publically open, allowing people to connect with people they know in Meezoog or to start their own communities.
Meezoog is not just a “stand-alone” or a “destination site”. Meezoog utilizes the Company’s Cross-Platform Social Layer to cover leading social networking platforms and sites (e.g. MySpace, LinkedIn, HI5). And as aforementioned, this platform is empowered by a proprietary algorithm engine. The purpose of this platform is to allow members the interaction with others, regardless of the “network of origin”.
Today Meezoog Social Layer includes Facebook and Meezoog.com, and soon will include additional platforms and social sites. Nonetheless, it should be emphasized that unlike social graph and data portability applications, Meezoog provides measurements of “social trust” as well as trust-based “human paths” that connect people. Those measurements are designed to imitate “real-life” trust among people and allow the social validation of users’ representation on the Net.
Additional important points:
• Meezoog allows the formation of private communities and networks to integrate like-minded individuals.
• Search results are presented in order of “social proximity” and a “trust gauge” shows the calculated “social trust” for every person in the network.
• The system analyzes and locates the most trusted paths between people.
• Instead of referring to all connections as “friends”, Meezoog specifies and embeds the nature of relationship: “teacher”, “close friend”, “uncle”, “coworker”, etc.; its duration (days, years, etc.); the frequency of communications (daily/monthly/special occasions, etc.); etc.
• Meezoog members also include non-singles who wish to bring in and vouch for their dear ones.
Cross-network interaction (think social graph) is going to be a popular feature in 2009. People want to be able to take their data with them and it should be easier to move to a new social network or dating site.
Meezoog has obviously done a pretty deep think about what it means to be friends and how to improve on the current oversimplified notion of a friend on social networks. Understanding the social proximity of people I’m interested in to people I trust sounds useful, but is it the kind of functionality thats unique enough to drive the growth of an entirely new site? Seems like this could be added to Facebook, avoiding the cold-start empty database issue. Actually, this would have been a great feature for Engage.
