Sexiest Geeks Alive

Back in 1998, I co-founded a startup company, Switchouse, which collected lists of what people had and what they wanted, found matches between lists, then suggested trades and sales between members. We focused on small, easily list-able items which could be sent through the mail, e.g., books, DVDs, games. Trading was addictive and fun, where the success of any given trade was based only partly on the actual monetary value and significantly on the personal meaning each item had to the trader (e.g., a rare hard-to-find book which was a gift from an ex can be of low value, a combination of books and CDs which has a clever theme gains points for amusement).

There was one idea that took hold of me then and has never let go, an idea which really is best realized now, when both data mining and social networking have become such integral parts of Web 2.0: matchmaking through list matching.

I always had a lot of fun browsing through other people’s lists, particularly those which had a major overlap with mine. I often was introduced to new bands and authors this way, and started looking forward to getting list updates from certain people. Checking out comments and ratings about any item they had was useful for gaining some insight into their personalities, but looking at what someone wanted was even more informative about their current interests and was pretty unique to Switchouse.

Just before the company succumbed to the .com collapse, I was beginning to explore the dating potential of our site. It started when another member wrote to me at one point and asked me out based on what he saw on my lists. We didn’t have the tools at the time to build the kind of interactive site that could really foster this sort of thing, but it was easy to see that this had the potential to develop into something cool. Certainly it could start with just suggesting matches of people based on their lists, but then quickly expand to include ideas like alerting everyone in the area that a certain band was playing and cross-selling the tickets to the show, maybe even suggesting others from the site who might also want to attend. I thought we could organize book clubs or live swapping events to gather together people drawn to certain genres (I did one live swap for geeks and it was a blast!). And then, when two switchers coupled up and moved in together, we could help them sell off the extra copies of whatever they both had in their collections!

I think this is a no-brainer for any company which already has a system for keeping updated media lists on their site (Amazon & Netflix, are you listening?). And if you set it up, let me know. I’m still looking for someone with compatible lists…