Jyve, a great new concept for search, officially launched the other day – but might have done so prematurely.
First of all, why such a great concept? There is so much content out there on the Internet and searching has become so powerful, that it is really hard to decide what is the best source of information when you are searching for something. Also, what if you don’t really know what you need to be searching for in the first place? Jyve has incorporated webchat, instant messaging and Skype capabilities to enable real people to interact with the person searching to give them the best answers to their questions. You can sign up for Jyve and select the areas in which you have some knowledge or expertise, then start responding to people’s searches. I tried it the other day, and it was great to help people out. As a user, you build up credits by giving good answers.
The bad news is that people are often asking stupid questions and people are often providing stupid answers. Also, there doesn’t seem to be a sufficient critial mass in users to actually make the thing worthwhile. I think Jyve should have used less public means to promote the site to build up the user base before launching so publicly. It’s a bit like Google – it was a good year or more that people were talking about Google as a great search engine, and a better alternative than Yahoo!, AltaVista and the others – before it started to gain widespread adoption.
That’s what Jyve should be doing. Concentrate on refining a great concept, get the user base to a critical mass, then launch it the world. Just a bit hasty there guys!
