Try Twitter Instead of Mahalo for People-Powered Search
While Jason Calacanis’ alpha Mahalo service has garnered attention for its human-powered approach to search, you might want to try Twitter instead. Gather some of your favorite people together and then, when you need specialized information or advice, ask them. You’ll be amazed what great results you can get.
For example, one of my friends needed some advice yesterday. He wanted to know how to set freelance consulting rates. Did he Google? Or Ask Metafilter? No, he used Twitter to do a people-powered search. He searched through his social network for the answer to his question.
My friend received advice that was both trustworthy and targeted. The advice was trustworthy because it came from people he knew. It was targeted because those people know him too — so they could take his particular situation into account when they provided tips and resources.
If you search on Google for information about setting freelance rates, you’d get some blog articles and some calculators, but how do you know what to trust? And even with Google’s personalized search, you’re not going to get information that knows as much about your situation as your friends and colleagues.
Mahalo does much worse than Google. It doesn’t have any results yet for “freelance consulting rates.” Granted, it’s still alpha, but this demonstrates a general problem with the approach: it can’t tap into human intelligence immediately like Twitter can.
Twitter social search would also work for questions like, “what’s a good restaurant in Boston to take a potential client to?” or “why is there a funky indentation in my blog theme?” People can easily parse these questions and ignore them if they have no idea. Or they can respond if they happen to be paying attention and have the time and inclination. Bonus: as questions get answered, social connections are created and deepened.
You wouldn’t want to saturate your Twitter network with every little search you do; Google and other search engines work fine in most cases. (And note that Google, in fact, embeds human intelligence in its search algorithms by considering links created by people). But some questions really need to be answered by your own social network, with technology just a means of connection.
Do you use Twitter for social search? What kind of questions have you gotten answered that way?
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I use Twitter for this all the time. Most recently I used it to ask if anyone had seen a LendingTree type site for home owner insurance. When no one had they started making recommendations to me on what companies to use with and I ended up signing up with a company that I had NEVER heard of before I had several close friends on Twitter recommend them.
C.C.: Yes, using Twitter this way is surprisingly powerful, I’ve found. You just have no idea what your friends know unless you ask… and Twitter is lightweight enough that you can ask without disrupting everyone. I would never email or IM some of the questions I ask.
The key to querying Google about things like “freelance consulting rates” is to avoid the term itself and look specifically for phrases people used by people who write about such things. Back when I was freelancing, I got a feel for the market by using wildcards in phrases coupled with related industry keywords, for example: “i charge * per hour” “web design”. All this while using some judgment to filter the good info from the bad, of course. I still think it’s a good way to passively scope out info, but of course actively querying a trusted community is better.
Good tip, Paulo, thanks. And I should have pointed out that asking a question on Twitter PLUS querying Google PLUS checking other information sources is a good way to come up with a really rich answer.
Great tip… I use Pownce and Twitter all the time to ask for tips and advice. I’d also recommend Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Answers for this kind of service.
I’ve gotten tons of good answers to questions I’ve asked there. Everything from “Point me to your best online resources for creating a good ‘pitch’,” to “Are there any other presidential candidates on Twitter besides Edwards and Obama?” (answer from DougH: @fredthompson is here and pretty active. Doing it right IMO – staff tweets are marked as such – and he does his own occasionally”)
Twitter is like this amazing pool of knowledge, just waiting to be tapped.
Agreed – my Twitter friend list already contains people who I trust and find interesting, so it makes sense to ask them certain questions. Yesterday I posed a query about a Facebook app and got fast, relevant answers.
I use this software called 8hands- It’s a profile aggregator.
anyway, besides its other great features, it has a super cool tag line-
Whenever you change it, your twitter updates accordingly.
Tell me what I’m missing b/c this sounds like BS to me. Maybe I don’t “get” Twitter. Question: What advantage does Twitter offer to the user that wants to ask his or her friends a question? Couldn’t you could have accomplished the same end result by sending an instant message to mulitple friends? Trillian has a feature that allows you to define groups for your contacts; it also allows you to send one message to any given group you’ve defined. What is so powerful about Twitter’s technology in this simple scenario (posing a question to friends)? The power seems to reside within the network of friends and not in whatever condiut one chooses to send the question. Christ, is Twitter paying for fluff articles like this? GRRR ;-)
Chris: I wouldn’t email or IM a bunch of my friends with a question or a wondering. Twitter is much more lightweight, a totally different model than either of those. It lends itself to use as a social search engine while IM and email don’t.
It’s something you have to experience though… just thinking about it isn’t going to allow you to “get it.”