At the end of January we wrote about a
new service called Imagini Friends, which is a
social network that calculates your "VisualDNA" and uses it to find other people that
match. At the time, it reminded me of the personality tests you find in magazines like
Vogue. Well it looks like Imagini has recently gotten a surge in popularity, thanks to a
huge digging (Saul Klein pointed
this out). The power of digg can be seen in the Alexa chart:
At the time of our review in January, I thought the most promising application for Imagini would be advertising and marketing - because of the demographic and consumer preferences data that it can obtain. As such, there are privacy implications for people who participate in this 'social network'. Some of the digg readers picked up on this, e.g. darkspire archly commented:
]]>"Of course it doesn't work, the responses appear to be canned, ie tied to specific images or groups of images. I did it two or three times as quite a few of the images overlap and yet not a single one of the profiles was even remotely close to my personality type. The primary flaw here seems to be the canned responses and too narrow of a scope. If you look at personality tests like Myers-Briggs they have similar questions with different wording or different choices to get a better feel for your response rather than just one to one correlations. Of course this isn't designed to be accurate it's designed to sell crap."
Still, it'll be interesting to see if Imagini Friends can maintain the momentum that a big digging has given them. Mike Arrington noted the other day that a Techcrunch review can send a spike of traffic to an app, but "then most of the people never come back". It would be a similar story with digg. Already the Alexa chart shows a dip after the (I presume) digg-generated spike. It'll be interesting to check back in a couple of weeks...
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