I recently met Ali Davar, CEO of Worio, at a nice little cafe across the street from the Web 2.0 Expo. He was accompanied by Mike Klaas, CTO. Worio has been around for roughly four years. This is a spinoff of the University of British Columbia. Canadian government grants initially kept them working part-time for nearly two years. More recently, Angel investors have given them enough capital to keep going full-time on this journey for another two years. That's all well and good, but I'm sure you want to know what have they been up to and why it's important to you.
Ali explained to me that, in a nutshell, Worio allows you to discover things you may like, but wouldn't have known to search for. Think of it as Pandora's music recommendations except it does this for keywords. It doesn't seek to supplant your popular search engine. They actually let you use search engines you've grown accustomed to. Therein lies the genius. It intends to improve your overall experience without reinventing the wheel. You're asked to use their website, but the interface is no more cumbersome than Google's. The Worio system works by keeping track of your surfing habits while you're logged in. I know, privacy concerns, privacy concerns. The information isn't shared if you don't want it to be. There's actually a button to turn "Personalization" off or on that's always at the top right near your login. The longer more you use Worio, the more it learns about what you like. Some of these interests can be recommended to your friends on Worio as well. For example, I search for the popular Latin American band Maná and it returns the standard Google results on the left while recommendations are displayed on the right. In this case it recommended websites to learn Spanish or discover indie music through another source. I'm not signed in so the discovery is obviously limited since it has to guess what I like. Roughly twenty heuristics go into determining what is of interest to people or what is being talked about or shared often on the internet. This doesn't try to send you to the back end of the long tail, it will deliver results anywhere along the spectrum that may be of interest to you.
Despite having a fully working website, Worio is still in its infancy. The system, as is, looks to be promising. It may very well be what you end up using to discover new and interesting things on the web. I encourage people to check out the website and provide feedback. Ali and his team are receptive to what they can do better.
Worio Website
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