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...
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Imagini Spikes After Being Dugg - Will It Last?.
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You don't need to wait weeks just let it go till the weekend and then by monday it will lay low, unless other people like yourself start blogging about it.
My turn now.
Posted by: Ali | March 12, 2007 2:08 PMAnother problem with Imagini is that their widget (which is how the service is expressed - you put it on your site) is static, i.e. the content is fixed in the widget code. So if you update your Imagini you have to go and get new widget code and install it. I thought it should be at least live widget code ...
Posted by: Ivan Pope | March 12, 2007 3:37 PMI just installed it a few days ago. It's different. People don't harass you and force you to be their contact. I was more on its visual effect. The picture cues that represent you is effective - for me that is. Of course it's static unless you want other answers. I haven't been to the main page except on the day I took the test. I did experience glitch.
Another thing is that there's an option if you prefer to be contacted or not. Basically it's a pretty widget for me, that's all. Nothing stressful unlike other social networking site where users morph into different personalities tricking people.
Posted by: ipanema | March 13, 2007 3:56 AM