Thursday, October 11, 2007

Search Engine Connects Chat Buddies

New search engine Attendi indexes people of common interest based on what they are conversing about. The fledgling site lets you search on a topic and find people who are online by exposing past conversations to the public.

Launched at DEMO in late September, Attendi's "content" is fairly limited as the first half dozen subjects I searched on (in the realms of technology, sports and literature) found no "experts." Attendi.com is the brainchild of Drew Rayman, the chairman of interactive agency i33 Communications.

This isn't a completely novel concept. Message boards and social networking sites let you find people in a similar way, but Attendi ups the ante with a slick interface using Web 2.0 technologies and lets you know who is online at the moment. Communication options include what we used to call forums, live chat sessions, and blogs.

To monetize the site, i33 is developing ad units that let consumers chat with customer service representatives about the products. It fits in with the theme of live conversations, but I'm not so sure that consumers spend their days hoping that someone would be there to talk about a product. Using the web for sales/customer service is an effective alternative to automated voice response systems. Whether or not consumer want to engage in it during search activities remains to be seen.

By John Gartner at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)

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