what's a one or two sentence explanation that would get my little sister to use this? what value would she get within the first 2 minutes (assume early on, before you have a ton of people using it?)
ideas like this are tough because they're only really useful once an incredible amount of content has been submitted. what tricks can you do to make the site be sticky to the first 100 users, when nothing yet is submitted? what are the first concrete things the user sees, or does, when they arrive at the site?
i think that's why these recommendation sites are only successful in niches (e.g. travel (tripadvisor), food/entertainment (yelp), movies (netflix)).
I've got a few ideas, such as front-loading the site with content and preference data by using differnt API's, such as Flickr's API, Youtube's, del.icio.us, Last.fm's. This way when you showup, lots of your preferences and rating "work" comes along with you. Additionally, the preference dataset is jumpstarted.
What you would tell your little sister about the site is "find more things you like, and if you're good at finding new content, be recognized for it."
ideas like this are tough because they're only really useful once an incredible amount of content has been submitted. what tricks can you do to make the site be sticky to the first 100 users, when nothing yet is submitted? what are the first concrete things the user sees, or does, when they arrive at the site?
i think that's why these recommendation sites are only successful in niches (e.g. travel (tripadvisor), food/entertainment (yelp), movies (netflix)).