There are great social networks and there are great search engines. I’m going to provide a little background on these two great technologies/services and explain how SideStripe came to be.
Social networks are those places where we spend a bit of time to keep in touch with our friends and get back in touch with our long lost friends. There are a ton of them out there, but Facebook and MySpace are the big players in the space with Facebook stealing the lead from MySpace this year. On social networks, we share things with our friends such as pictures we took on our last vacation and we what we are doing now. When you really dig into it, social networks are communication tools.
Search engines let us find information that is available on the Internet. Some do this better than others and usually “better” means that we find what we are looking for in the shortest amount of time (first page of results). Google became the dominant search engine because they figured out a “better” way to put the most relevant results at the top via their PageRank algorithm and until someone comes up with a “betterer” way than Google, they will remain the dominant search engine.
The idea for SideStripe came about from the following scenario that I’m sure you all can relate to: you search for something in your favorite search engine and after several searches, you just can’t find what you are looking for. So you call/text/IM/email a friend. For example, “general contractor san francisco”. You find some results, but you really don’t know who you can trust or anything about them, so the best thing to do is ask a friend who can recommend a contractor that they’ve had personal experience with. Or you search for “snowboarders” and you find the US Snowboarding Team, but what you really wanted to find is an activity partner and who better to be your activity partner than a friend. It was this common scenario that provided us with the "Aha!” moment and thus we conceived of SideStripe to solve this very problem.
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