matthewer

It think this is a real shame. All the Facebook, but for my dog / Facebook, but for my garden / Myspace, but for my Facebooks have really given a bad name to this genre of site. It became the type of site for people who were looking to cash in quickly or had no business getting involved in the internet.

The problem is that the web is a social animal. People want to interact and share. I hope we see the move toward social/crowd-source sites with loftier goals. I think there is still a lot of value to be had in these types of sites.

You just find the trail as you go.

Users launch a trend that they think is going to be big or is something they are into (saving the environment, american apparel, ect.) We then track how many users on our site like it (and where they are from, age, and sex) plus aggregated information from the internet.

We are hoping to see how the trends connect with each other, and how users find new trends. We call this tracking influence.

We are constantly working on our algorithm adding more sources. We think this is a balance between users finding the newest thing, and existing data channels (does that make sense?)

Once you sign up, the goal is to earn points by getting in/starting a new big trend. This might help: http://edopter.com/howitworks

"I think if you place social suggestions at the heart of the service it just becomes another social news site."

I agree. We focused on this first because having user input is important to us. We strongly want to avoid becoming a digg or reddit clone, but at the same time we want to avoid being based only on science and mining the data from other sources.

“When you're talking about trend identification and forecasting, most customers want some degree of editorial analysis (Springwise, Teentracking focus groups, etc.) and/or some type of meta-analysis based on aggregate data, such as search data (Yahoo Buzz, Google Trends)”

I totally agree. Our system balances our users opinions with data from outside sources (we call this the X-factor.) By combining the two data streams we are able to get (imho) the best of both worlds. As I said, the front end for the users took up a lot of time; however, we are working hard on refining our algorithm and adding more sources. We want to combine the data driven resources of a Nielsen with the forward thinking early adopters of a “look-look’ (http://www.look-look.com/)

“How do you plan to make money?”

We want to connect our users with businesses. Users can trade points for products and opportunities from the right sponsors. Someone who is into sports could have an opportunity to try out the newest snowboard. We are working on this part of the site, but expect it to be up with in a month. Sneak peak: http://edopter.com/showcase/

Thanks for the feedback. These are some great ideas, and will work on making things more clear on the site.