(This is a review of one of the 7 startups presenting today at Techonomy 2010 in Tel Aviv. To read about the others, browse all posts tagged ‘techonomy’.)
Questions about the meaning of life? Stuck with an overweight dilemma? Sure, you could reach out to the masses who are following you on Twitter or Facebook, but what are the chances of getting answers only from the few people whose opinions you actually care about? And what if it concerns a private matter?
Emailing a specific group of people could do the trick … but then again, it could make the problem-solving process even more complex and long-winded.
Enter SircleIt, which lets you group your Facebook contacts into lists of people based on pre- or self-defined categories (e.g. ‘beer buddies’, ‘Giants fans’, ‘male chauvinist pigs’, etc.) and enables you to address your questions or share your problems with those people and those people only, which is especially useful if you wanna get few but relevant answers from your subsets of your social graph, or if it concerns a delicate matter that can’t be thrown out into the open just like that.
When you sign up for SircleIt, using Facebook Connect, the service checks which friends are already a member, or you can invite them to join. You’re also supposed to let the company know what your specific skills are, so people can determine easier what it is you can help them with. The UI is clunky, but on the flip side makes it extremely easy to both algorithmically and manually create clusters of friends, family members, classmates, and so on.
Once you’ve grouped people in ‘sircles’ (social circles), and you can ask them questions or even poll them on a given subject. Users you direct your question to get a notification by email that you’re looking for their help, and they can log on to the platform and lend you a virtual hand. Watch the demo video below for more info.
In a way, SircleIt sounded to me a lot like Aardvark (recently purchased by Google) and Quora, although SircleIt’s founders insist that there’s much more to their service and that it does not revolve around social search but rather social yet targeted Q&A and problem-solving.
Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.
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