Hi, You mention a very critical point about the network. I worked on the launch of an online exchange many years back and a lot of the success has to do with how many users you get. However i'm also of the opinion that the actual matching algorithmn can have a critical bearing on the success as well.
For example assume you can only match with someone who is the exact opposite to yourself. I have A and want B and you have B and want A. To find matches you then need a lot of users. If however you widen it out to allow say 3 people to match then you could have a match created if the following occurs. -I have A and want B -Another user has B and wants C -Yet another user has C and wants A So by allowing these higher order matches you get a much better chance of matches actually happening for a smaller number of participants. In my local barter website i have taken this to the extreme that i have no limit on the number of people that can be matched in such a chain. All i do is, at some fixed interval(currently expected to be weekly), i take all the orders and try to come up with the matches that maximises (or attempts to maximise as it is unlikley i would get the global maximum) the amount of business done on the exchange. Of course things becomes impractical if the number of users is very high but as i said it is a local barter website. Anyway one of the reasons i posted this in the first place was to see what people though and to see is some other people would be interested in participating in an Open Source Project on it. I remember a while back there was talk of some project in the Python Ireland group. Also a similar concept could be applied to books. I already have got the domain www.ihavereadthebook.com. So is anybody interested? tks, PJ On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Steve McConville < [email protected]> wrote: > > > I am developing a site that users can input details of the permuations of > > technologies they have used on projects in the past. They can also input > > details of the permutation of the technology they are now planning to use > on > > a project. The site will match users with offsetting requirements and > > I have considered a similar idea, though mine was more of a > recommendations/search engine than a social network: eg. if you are > looking in category "Relational Databases" for something that works > with Django and Ubuntu then top of the list should be Postgres, with > links to the project website, ohloh and a small wiki attached for > people to discuss their experiences with the combination. My idea also > included anonymity by default for both stack submitters and users, but > with optional identity. As with all these things, there's a > chicken-and-egg problem of being useless until the network is big > enough to tell you what you don't already know. > > There's a another take on the basic idea here > > http://www.appliedstacks.com/ > > and these guys have resorted to spidering to get their dataset (less > than 700 manual submissions). > > -- > steev > http://www.daikaiju.org.uk/~steve/ <http://www.daikaiju.org.uk/%7Esteve/> > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Ireland" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.ie/group/pythonireland?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
