http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/1879/do-they-have-a-user-for-you
February 15, 2007 Do They Have a User for You... Having trouble making friends on MySpace? Another social-networking Web site is looking to set you up with some friends you might like. Mindkin was designed by students at Carnegie Mellon University as an online matchmaker, to help users find friends they may be compatible with. The university's student newspaper, The Tartan, says people are getting fed up with Facebook, MySpace, and other sites on which users must choose their own connections, often ending up with online "friends" whom they hardly even know. Mindkin, on the other hand, matches people according to their thoughts and interests, which people rate on their personal pages. Those people who found the most compatible for a given user are automatically made his or her friends. --Dan Carnevale Posted on Thursday February 15, 2007 http://www.thetartan.org/2007/2/12/scitech/mindkin New Mindkin program creates online social network Sci/Tech | Jun Xian Leong Since the inception in 2002 of Friendster, an online friendship network, the online social scene has long been defined by similar networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Multiply, and Xanga. Now, four CMU students have unveiled a program that bases online friendships on a person’s thoughts. Enter Mindkin, a program devoted to social networking online. Mindkin is the brainchild of Ph.D. students Vasco Pedro, Betty Cheng, and Ulas Bardak from Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute, and Jahanzeb Sherwani from the Computer Science Department. In former online versions of social networks, people simply added friends’ names when they wanted, as long as both parties consented. This process allowed for large, sprawling social networks, but many problems surfaced. In particular, many people barely knew anything about most people on their “friends list” besides what sparse details the friends chose to display. As Jim Lauderback stated in his column for PC Magazine titled “Too Many Fake Friends,” “Now I’ve got more than 50 friends — some of whom I barely even know. There’s a sense of shared experience and trust...that’s all sadly lacking on these social networks. Instead, friendship is being co-opted for more insalubrious purposes.” In addition, sites such as fakeyourspace.com sprung up, where anyone could buy “fake friends” for their social sites, for the sole purpose of appearing more popular. Mindkin, however, does away with these problems altogether. On Mindkin, people are matched, quite literally, by their thoughts and interests, and users can only network with people who have similar thoughts or find similar things interesting. People who use Mindkin put their thoughts into the “thoughtstream”, which flows past the screen at a varying rate. The thoughtstream shows thoughts from all past users of Mindkin, and users can designate each thought as a thought they like or dislike. A person’s friends are defined by these likes and dislikes. More specifically, each user’s picture is split into a nine-piece jigsaw. When a user likes a thought from the thoughtstream, he or she gains a jigsaw piece of the person who posted the thought. When all nine pieces have been assembled, or when someone has selected that he or she likes nine thoughts from the same person, that person becomes his or her Mindkin, and a personal profile is revealed. “Mindkin may become a content space where you produce much less content, but means much more to you,” Pedro said. “Defining thoughts you like or dislike is a good base upon which to detect your interests, and this will allow you to form friendships which go deeper than the surface.” In effect, Mindkin allows people to meet and befriend other people online who share similar thought patterns, likes, and dislikes, rather than the common methods employed by conventional sites. Current sites allow you to see people’s interests after adding them; Mindkin first matches you with people with similar thoughts before adding them to your friends list. “There was initially a certain amount of concern about the safety of a global thoughtstream to which everyone is free to contribute. But we’re not censoring anything at all,” Cheng said. “The entire concept of the Internet is free speech and thought, and we understand people’s need for freedom. However, we do have a filter system in place, which checks for extreme cases such as very racist comments, which are perhaps the only sort of thing we might censor.” “We’re working on the concept of a thought having ‘energy,’ gaining energy as more people like it, and losing energy as people dislike it.” Bardak said. “ There will definitely be multiple things determining how a thought recycles in the stream; thoughts with high energy will recycle more often.” This process would eventually allow Mindkin to become regulated by the users. Offensive comments, such as racist slurs or curses, would be quickly drowned out if many people disliked them. The team is revising and improving the algorithm for selective filtering of thoughts. Mindkin operates on an algorithm which filters thoughts into categories and actively displays more thoughts from categories which a user likes as determined from previous choices. The team realized that this was a necessity if Mindkin goes worldwide to allow people to deal with the volume of incoming thoughts from people all around the world. However, a random element will always be present to show thoughts from the global thoughtstream. “We might create separate thoughtstreams for different specific groups,” Pedro explained. “It would be a sort of convergence, where people who enjoy similar things gradually see similar thoughts in their streams, and form their own community. The idea is to have small groups of true friends.” The team said that they hope to expand Mindkin to handheld devices, allowing users to plug into the thoughtstream from wherever there is Wi-Fi. One notable thought floating in the thoughtstream, which may become the tagline for Mindkin at Carnegie Mellon, stated: “Mindkin = e-fence, without having to spend the night out in the cold!” Mindkin is currently only open to Carnegie Mellon students. However, the team hopes to release the program to the public in the near future. Mindkin is currently only viewable on Internet Explorer. Due to overwhelming public demand, though, support for other browsers will be added in the future;. In fact, support for Firefox is expected to be available at press time. Pedro said that Associate Dean of Student Affairs Paul Fowler had been especially helpful to the team’s work so far. “He was always supportive and made everything go smoothly for us,” Cheng added. “We wouldn’t be here without his help.” The website for Mindkin is www.mindkin.com.
