fooWHO: social bookmarking with a pinch of eHarmony

A new site named fooWHO grabbed my attention earlier today. It pitches itself as a delivery service for links and stories that are "just for you." The site bases this presumption off of a rather lengthy personality test that you fill out at your leisure, consisting of questions in a dozen different categories, ranging from arts and entertainment all the way to your taste in automobiles and their transmissions. The remainder of the service is very similar to Reddit, with a front page of popular stories and a pool of submitted links that can be rated up or down. The hope is that you will be able to discover new links that are both popular to everyone, and a smattering of those that match your tastes.

Once an item is rated, fooWHO will break down which personality types it's the most popular with--based on the highest number of people who have answered a certain question the same way. From there, you can click on the question to find links people have voted on with the same disposition. There's a very exploratory nature about it.

One of the most innovative, and perhaps necessary, features of fooWHO that I really wish would makes its way into a service like Digg, is giving trusted members (read: heavy users) editing privileges for story titles and descriptions. If Wikipedia has proven anything (well, maybe not lately), community editing can work if judgment and reservation are used.

In the meantime, fooWHO is missing some key add-ons to help grow out the site and aid users in adding links--like submission tools and ways to promote items on blogs and Web sites. I still prefer Reddit, Digg, and Del.icio.us for serving up new and interesting links over fooWHO's system, but recommendation engines like StumbleUpon have proven that the wisdom of the crowds can be harnessed effectively with a little user elbow grease.

fooWHO is a little bit like Reddit and Digg put together, and look it even has a section for photos!

(Credit: CNET Networks)

[YanivP]

Thanks for the review!

We are more than pleased to see reviews of our site and listen to user comments. Our team is currently alpha testing our new external API to allow users to do exactly what you mentioned in the last paragraph.

Please allow us a few more days to get things done, since we prefer quality over rushing things.

You can follow our progress at http://foowho.blogspot.com

Yaniv.
fooWHO Cofounder.

[Qwerty Cake]

Anything with "foo" in the name

I think I'd rather just use RSS feeds in live bookmarks from sites I already know about, but this seems cool. I don't think I've ever seen anything like this, and the fact that it has "foo" in the name makes it that much cooler.