YouWereMe is a service that allows you to ask the often difficult to answer question, “What would you do if you were me?” It’s a pretty clever setup. Say you forgot your grandmother’s birthday, you can request advice from a 60 year old woman to see if she had a few suggestions. The entire thing is facilitated by a built in chat.

I had the pleasure of asking a few questions to one of the founders of YouWereMe, Florian Hartung, and this is what he had to say.

YouWereMe

Tell me a little something about YouWereMe. I seems like it is some kind of collaborative advice network. What problem were you trying to solve when you made it?

1. Yes, you’re right. You could call it a “peer advice” application, where people get together to exchange experience, perspectives and opinions. It helps people answering the basic question “What would you do if you were me?”. This is the core concept of our site. For example, imagine that you have to make an important decision but you can’t decide for yourself. Youwereme.com would give you the possibility to ask others what they would do if they were in your place by entering a 1:1 chat dialogue. We decided to go with a chat-like system instead of an open forum to keep the conversation private.

We even took this advice concept one step further and give the asker the option to specify a profile of the desired answerer. So if you would like to know how the opposite gender thinks of your actions, just choose between “male” or “female”. The possibilities are numerous, they range from birthday present advice to how to propose to your girlfriend. The service is free of charge and doesn’t require users to be experts in certain areas (unlike Google Answers or Lycos IQ). Everyone can and is invited to contribute to our service.

Gaining Critical Mass

With a product like this the hardest thing is getting the critical mass of people to make it work. What are you doing to attract initial users to the system and keep them coming back?

2. True. We think a good marketing strategy is key. Right know, we are in the stage of attracting users by posting articles to news sites and blogs. We also try to facilitate social networking sites.

It is important for our site that we have enough users online to keep conversations going. For a better user experience, we plan to introduce and inform our users about a “rush hour” event, where we announce a particular timeframe (most likely in the evening) on selected days. This might help us to get as many users online as possible at the same time. We also consider dropping the required user registration until the sites has gained popularity.

The Approach

What do you think makes your approach better than traditional Forums that deal in similar subjects?

3. We think that we can benefit from our “live” advantage. Once you have entered a conversation, you can start asking questions, rephrase them and develop a real conversation which would be much harder in a forum style. With a sufficient amount of users, you would also get connected instantly and get an answer to your question as quickly as possibly. Another factor that sets us apart is confidentiality. We don’t log conversations or post them to our website. Another interesting thing that differentiates us from traditional Question&Answer sites is that the answerer is not aware of the question of the asker before he enters the conversation. This will hopefully guarantee more objective answers. Last but not least, in a 1:1 conversation the asker can describe his or her inquiry in more detail (together with the personal background) and would get a more personalized answer.

What Does The Future Hold?

What do you think is the next big development in the web? If Web 2.0 was about collaboration, what does the future hold?

4. I personally think that the Internet is all about bringing people together, regardless of physical location. Web applications can facilitate this in any possible way. For example, we might see web sites where you could plan activities with friends from the online world and do them together somewhere on the web. The traditional way of going out to parties, movies etc could get transfered to the online world. What about an online movie theatre for example?

Stay home but watch a movie “together” with other users online. Like a real cinema experience, hear their laughter and their reactions, maybe include a popcorn delivery service.

We think that Youwereme.com is already a step in the direction of bringing people closer together by allowing them to receive or give advice from strangers, which might even help them to drop their barriers and express themselves without reservations.

Web 2.0 Roundup

I would like to thank Florian for taking the time to chat with me. I you have more questions about YouWereMe, or would like to try the service out be sure to give them a visit. It might not solve all your problems, but it certainly is an entertaining way to tap into some advice that you may not have been able to receive from traditional sources.

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