Show HN: HumanamuH predicts which people will enrich your life

http://humanamuh.de/

by HumanamuH • 14 years ago

43 46 14 years ago

humanamuh.de

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

... and it will let you meet them.

Hi everyone! I'd much appreciate your feedback, ideas, questions etc. regarding HumanamuH [1].

HumanamuH is all about efficiently meeting people who you find worthwhile to meet. It works like this:

1) You search for people

2) You talk to them

3) You rate them

4) HumanamuH predicts who else is worth meeting

Your predictions are based on people who like and dislike the same people as you do. It's important to note that people don't get a global rating, so there won't be good and bad people. There will only be people who are more or less likely to find meeting each other worthwhile.

There are still many issues I have to work on. The biggest challenge I am currently facing is to get users in order to find out how people feel about HumanamuH. If you have any advice on how to "go viral", I'd be happy to listen.

[1] Why this name? Its slogan is "Where humans meet." therefore "Human" meets "Human" => "HumanamuH".

lubutu2• 14 years ago

I think it would be much more inviting if you could at least search for people without having made an account. As it stands I have no idea what kind of people I could talk to, so I have no idea if it would be worth giving up my email address.

Edit: Interesting idea, though. With social networks like Facebook you really need to have met in order to befriend — it doesn't encourage random meetings. When I was younger I would find likeminded people by chance on odd websites; I think that's become harder as I've grown older.

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

Yes, I understand your point. I didn't want to share the user profiles with non-users. I also haven't looked into how easy it would be to harvest profile pictures and profile data. Any thoughts on this?

SatvikBeri• 14 years ago

Some suggestions for what kinds of things to write in the "Intentions" area would be helpful. It's pretty vague right now.

Edit to add: I really love this idea, and am looking forward to seeing if it takes off!

One more suggestion: this is the kind of service that actually would really benefit from Facebook integration. You could take likes, photos, etc. to very quickly populate a profile instead of filling it out by hand.

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

Glad you like the idea!

I'll think about suggestions for the "intentions" field. However, I don't want to suggest something that will end up in most profiles. Priming is powerful.

I expected someone would bring up Facebook integration. :-)

As someone who doesn't use Facebook and who has some issues with it, I haven't even considered integrating it and I'm not sure how much the profile data would match. I don't intend HumanamuH to become an advertising column, so much for sure.

Can you suggest anything besides photos that would fit the current HumanamuH profile?

juanbyrge• 14 years ago

This is an amazing idea. I think it has infinite potential. Are you working in it full time ?

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

I'm glad you like the idea. I am working near full time on it. Who needs weekends anyways?

taybin• 14 years ago

Don't these sort of graphs always end up with a couple nodes having the majority of connections?

I'm leery of the idea of rating people and suspect this will just make explicit existing hierarchies.

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

It would be great if I had a big enough graph to answer your question. Hopefully this will change. It would be very interesting data.

My hope is that, given enough users, there will be many predictions across existing hierarchies.

jkaljundi2• 14 years ago

You should provide more information on how the service works and what it does before asking for an e-mail address to sign up.

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

I haven't yet decided on how much of "how does it work" I want to make public.

Regarding your second question. I thought the landing page and the tour would answer "what it does". Sorry. Obviously, I'd be very curious to know what it didn't tell you. But if you haven't registered, you probably can't answer this question.

I'm not blocking any email domains, so feel free to use some trash mail address, if you want to have a look without sharing your email address.

naturalethic2• 14 years ago

I almost didn't sign up because I couldn't really tell what this was. I went ahead anyway and when I finally saw the landing page I thought, "Oh it's a dating site. No thanks."

jkaljundi2• 14 years ago

By "how it works" did not mean the internals but how the usage flow looks to the user and what the actual functionality is.

Re "what it does" - might have been my Saturday morning slowness, but I completely missed the tour link/page.

You could do some tests on the landing page using http://fivesecondtest.com/ to see what others notice and understand there. Good luck!

dylanpyle• 14 years ago

FYI - the confirmation email ended up in my spam folder. I'm not sure if that's gmail's default behavior or whether I've encouraged it to be a little too agressive, something to watch out for though.

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

That's a pity. I cannot remember anyone else telling me that it was spam filtered. But that doesn't have to mean anything.

Do you have any suggestions what I could improve to make these emails pass?

adgar• 14 years ago

Use the most trusted e-mail sending service you can find and afford. Don't roll your own. Spam has made e-mail such an untrustworthy system that your e-mail's origin has to have a track record, these days.

You'll find a continuum of options for e-mail sending services. I'd pick the one that's most trusted within reason, not necessarily the "best deal." To me, it's an image thing: every time your e-mail ends in a Spam folder you let that user down a little. If they do find it, you've still disappointed them a little.

rcavezza• 14 years ago

I'd go with sendgrid. I hook up their api to every app I build.

angry-hacker• 14 years ago

Same here, it went to Hotmail's spam folder though.

FredBrach3• 14 years ago

I think I got the point of the website finally. You should probably consider removing the sexual orientation of the profile informations, at least for a time, because it can be misleading about the goal of the website.

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

(My reply mysteriously disappeared. Second try...)

HumanamuH is not meant to be a dating site in particular. But I assume wherever people meet, some of them will want to date. I like the idea of HumanamuH bringing love to the world, so I'm fine with it.

The possibility to state one's orientation and whether one is looking for a partner is there for at least two reasons.

If you don't want to date, you can make that clear upfront. Hopefully this will reduce unwanted requests.

If you want to date, it's easier for everyone involved if the orientation is known beforehand.

FredBrach3• 14 years ago

Do you aim private life meetings or not only? Btw, the website is strong, looks serious and relatively trustable. It's a bit tedious to access the content but it's not very important, some people will care anyway. Best luck with it.

autophil3• 14 years ago

Love the name. Clever. The website is a little more mysterious than I'd initially like, but I'll give it a try. I wish you success with this!

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

I didn't expect so much love for the name as I've got mixed opinions before making HumanamuH public.

Please let me know what was mysterious to you. (If it's not too mysterious for you to know...)

autophil3• 14 years ago

I just didn't know what I was signing up for, and the name doesn't tell me anything. But I like the name a lot. I just think you need a killer tagline or something.

TimPC• 14 years ago

Are you doing any machine learning? Are you using an Amazon style recommendation system where instead of recommending people based on overall rating you're looking for poeple user's like me rated highly (based on the ratings we've given to other people so far and our declared goals for the site?)

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

I am not doing any machine learning (yet). If the site takes off a bit and generates some data, I expect optimizing the prediction algorithm will become a top priority. Accurately predicting human relationships sounds incredibly hard.

Currently, it's looking how similar your ratings are to the ratings of others. Similar people will influence your predictions more strongly.

The declared goals or intentions are currently not affecting predictions. And I'm doubtful if they should. Any opinion on this?

corin_• 14 years ago

Small postcode bug, it won't accept "PE29 3EW" in the UK.

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

Ah, thanks. I haven't yet finished testing all post codes. ;-)

begriffs• 14 years ago

Two things I really like about this social network: it's simple, and it's oriented towards connecting interesting people.

I love that people get to post their intentions. Intentions mean people are doing things -- and can meet and help each other. This site is not for photosharing narcissists who are scared to venture outside their circle of friends, it's for adventurous people who want to meet more people to "enrich their lives" as the site says.

I'm excited to see HumanamuH take off, and I'm looking forward to using the "enriching" social network.

HumanamuH21• 14 years ago

I hope that knowing what people intend to talk about and intend to do makes meeting people online a better experience. Especially in combination with predictions.

After reading online profiles, I often feel that I'm still missing something to decide whether I want to meet that person. Knowing about favorite movies or brands or whether someone is bad at describing himself, doesn't tell me much.

Show HN: HumanamuH predicts which people will enrich your life

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