Hey HN,<p>I have this idea: An app that lets you find your 'cognitive siblings' - people that share your viewpoints, interests, etc. based on (a subset of) your browsing history.<p>Would like to see if this is something worth building a prototype for.<p>Facebook, but for connecting with people that you haven't met yet. Twitter, but finding also 'non-famous' cognitive siblings.<p>The idea is a plugin, that records your browsing history and shows you people with similar histories that you can then connect with.<p>Do you think that would produce interesting sibling results? Why / Why not? Has it been attempted before - why didn't it work out? (Maybe leaving privacy issues aside here for now)
I think this is a pretty interesting idea.<p>Someone mentioned why not just follow subreddits. I noticed that subreddits are often a collection of the extremes of a hobby or interest. I would say that I'm a collection of interest that make up my unique personality, while subreddits often have people that are really deep into a specific topic.<p>One thing to note about your idea, is I've used apps in the past that connect you with people that you share interest with, but I often flake when it comes to actually meeting with people in person... I wonder if this is a common trend? I feel like I almost ended up using them as a self validation.... but never followed through much with meeting people.
I like the browsing history concept, because browsing and search history really delves deep into who someone is, but you might get a more accurate image of someone’s real-life self by using an interests questionnaire alongside or in place of browsing history to better see the offline interests someone has.<p>For instance, I really like cycling, but my programming-related Google searches eclipse my cycling-related ones by a huge margin, so your hypothetical algorithm would rank programming as a much greater interest than cycling, even if I spend about equal amounts of time on each.
Connecting with similar people would be good.<p>Getting relevant link recommendations would be great.<p>Similar ideas: delicious, prismatic, StumbleUpon.<p>Biggest issues are probably chicken-and-egg problem and privacy concerns.
In any case such a tool may warn the user against its potential echo chamber effect.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_%28media%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_%28media%29</a>
This would either be a very good or very bad dating site. I'd like to be positive and say very good, but I've been online long enough to have concerns...:)