[JDEV] "people matching" system for Jabber

[Rob Brown]

Hi,

I'd like to see if anyone is interested in participating in (or simply 
discussing) a project to hook an existing people-matcher into Jabber.

I have a brand new, already-functioning people matching system, which many 
people tell me is the most sophisticated (and cool :-) ) one out there.  It 
is called HyperMatch ( please check out its user interface and such at 
http://www.hypermatch.com ), and is currently functioning as a standalone, 
web-based system.  In other words, it's more or less a "dating service", 
but I *really* hate that term :-) (it will also do friend/activity 
partners, and even roommates,....but the romance/flirting thing seem to be 
the most in-demand, of course).  Also unlike most traditional dating 
services, this is intended to always be completely free.

I would like to do something very different with this, which is to hook it 
into the IM world, as a powerful way of populating buddy-lists with cool, 
like-minded people.  The closest comparable thing I can think of is ICQ's 
popular "random chat" feature....except that this won't be random, it will 
match you with chat partners based on a very sophisticated fuzzy-logic 
compatibility matching algorithm that takes into account all kinds of 
common interests, your gender/location/age, etc.  Another difference 
between random chat and what I am envisioning is that I'd like to have this 
be a bit more "proactive," in that it might initiate contacts itself as 
they become available (for instance, it might send a message to both 
parties: "you two are perfect for each other and are both online now...you 
should talk") rather than just wait for one or the other to say "find me a 
chat partner now".  Of course, you would be able to make yourself 
available/unavailable to the service easily.

So my idea is this:  we would create an open protocol (a simple extension 
of Jabber's) whereby IM clients and/or servers can communicate directly 
with a matching server.  This would be open/interoperable in two ways:

1) any IM system (not just Jabber) would be able to hook into this.  So for 
instance there might be people who are happy using ICQ for now, but would 
still like to use hypermatch. (Jabber would presumably be the first to 
support it directly though)

2) any other matching system (which might be totally different from 
hypermatch) would be able to support the protocol, so an IM user could 
choose to hook into that other system instead of (or in addition to) 
hypermatch.

People would probably still edit their profiles in a browser, and from then 
on all interaction is through their IM client (changes to the clients, UI 
and otherwise, would not be strictly necessary, but minor ones may be 
desirable).

My question is:  is anyone interested in discussing how to best implement 
this?  And secondly, is anyone interested in helping to hook it up?  To be 
honest, it seems like it could be very, very simple to do, since the hard 
part (the actual matching engine and the profile editor) is already working.

I encourage anyone to take a look at the hypermatch demo (and sign up if 
you'd like...although right now it is only accepting US zip codes), and see 
if you think it seems like it would be an enhancement to the IM world.  If 
nothing else take a look at some of the comments it has received -- 
http://www.hypermatch.com/comments.html -- people seem to be pretty 
enthusiatic about it (even though relatively few have found it yet!), 
especially the user interface.

-rob