Globe Alive. The missing Web. What a cool idea. I may just sign up!
Allen has mounted a passionate argument on behalf of the inspired idea behind GlobeAlive: That we have fine search engines for documents, but not for people.
He explains:
What I'm talking about is something entirely different. What I'm talking about is using the Qeb to find actual people in the world at large that you can talk to right now, about whatever you¹re specifically searching for. There's nothing like that yet. Nothing. People aren't searchable. They¹re the most important resource in the world, and they¹re not searchable, they¹re scattered to the wind. There¹s no People tab at Google (and "groups" isn¹t the idea at all). That person you want to talk to right now (and that wants to hear from you right now) that needle in the haystack of 6 billion, is out there, I promise, but you¹ll never find them, because the magnet you need to do so doesn¹t exist. I want to build it.
To a significant degree, he has. With GlobeAlive, Allen is prototyping the idea very nicely. The hundreds who have joined in, and are also passionate about it, bear witness to something.
Allen has bootstrapped this thing on a shoestring. Somebody needs to come in with some money and take it to the next level. If I had it, I would (even if he wasn't my son). But maybe one of ya'll do. If so, jump ahead to Allen's closing paragraph:
 The bottom line is that when we restrict our interactions to people we already know or the people that happen to be in the chat room or community we join, it's like restricting our information-gathering to the books in our personal libraries at home, it's a mathematical certainty that we¹re selling ourselves utterly short. The island mentality is the root of this problem. There¹s an infinitely better way of going about our interpersonal interactions. It would change the web by making it live; it would change the economy by making it personal; it would change the world by making it smaller; and it would change you and I... by helping us meet.
Too bad VCs only invest in companies that are already making money (like SixApart.) Too bad there aren't investors out there to invest in great ideas like k-collector, blogrolling.com, Technorati, TopicExchange, Mobitopia, WebOutliner or GlobeAlive. [Marc's Voice]
11:30:56 AM 
|
My 13-year-old niece turned me on to Badass Buddy, a site with more than a thousand free icons for AOL Instant Messenger. My faves as of this minute are "Kinky" and "Torture." 
