Family Learning Center

Youtego: Making Friends Through Self-Visualization

Some of the most viral experiences on the internet are also self-referential. Users spend hours on sites like StumbleUpon and Redux simply to build up their profiles and re-establish their status as coolhunters. While these sites exist as social tools for external exploration and discovery, Youtego offers a quiet approach to self-discovery.

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In the past ReadWriteWeb covered Lunch.com – a friend-matching community service powered by a similarity network engine. While Lunch prompts users to answer specific movie, book and food-related questions, Youtego encourages users to upload photos that best represent them from Flickr, Picasa and their hard drives. Users add information about their job and work history, knowledge base, capabilities and loves. A complete user profile encompasses a series of images and meta data and friend recommendations are determined by similar tags, images and common concepts.

While the approaches are slightly different, Lunch and Youtego share a common goal in establishing better relationships by reconnecting with our wants and needs. And if you believe in self-actualization as the final stage in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, then perhaps Youtego’s self-visualizations are a map to achieving our highest potential. The first 500 ReadWriteWeb readers to visit youtego.com/reg/readwriteweb receive early access to this closed-beta site. Check it out and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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