Qubox
by Carlos Menezes
A short time ago I caught wind of qubox, a search engine with a difference. It allows you to search for other users that think in the same way as you do.
Upon registration you are asked to complete a series of “quboxes” which, according to the site, are based upon proven psychological techniques. Upon completing each of these puzzle cubes you are presented with a list of the people that best match you along with a rating of just how similarly to you they think.
The quboxes currently span the following categories: Celebrities, Short Breaks, TV Shows, Changing Britain, Money Matters, Holidays and Love. Obviously a person's personality spans an almost infinite amount of categories, so this might provide a reason as to why qubox hasn't yet provided a best holistic match. Instead, best matches are only provided for each individual category. Thus it’s possible to search for someone who enjoys undertaking holidays or getting away from life in much the same fashion as you do.
One of the best things that the site has going for it is that it requires very low-involvement from a user's perspective. One simply logs in, clicks on a series of pictures and phrases in the order which they most appeal to you, and wait for your results to be displayed. True, some time will be spent on wondering whether the picture of a yacht really appeals to you more than a photo of the Colosseum, but all in all this is a much more pleasant experience than filling in hundreds of multiple-choice questions.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, this low involvement also happens to be one of the site's biggest detriments. There's not much that keeps a user coming back once they have completed all of their quboxes except to see who the current best matches are.
I took the site for a spin, first up completing the “celebrities” qubox. I was pretty surprised that the closest match to me was an 18 year-old guy who's into emo dancing. I must admit though, that for this particular category I could see why we would be rated so similarly – while we may not think similarly in holistic terms, or even share a similar outlook on life I can't imagine either of us having a sterling opinion of Paris Hilton. So I carried on with completing the quboxes.
Next up was “TV Shows”. Here I got matched with a 50 year old-guy who is a self-confessed music lover, exerciseaholic and a company starter. Now this was a lot more of what I was expecting, and with a 98% match my faith in the site began to grow.
The third and final qubox that I completed was based on “Short Breaks”. This time it was a 98% match with a 21 year-old who had no descriptions on his profile page other than a picture of his beaming grin.
As for the validity of the results I'm inclined to agree that while not foolproof, they do provide a relatively accurate approximation of like-mindedness. One would expect people of the same sex to be more similarly wired and this was somewhat validated by the fact that of the top 5 results for each of the three categories that I filled out I was only matched with two female profiles.
As it stands, despite how cool I find the concept, I don't think that qubox has enough going for it in order to be the “next big thing.” Rather I can see it becoming a very popular Facebook application. Although I can understand why qubox would be reluctant to follow this route the site could do very well with expanding on its users' interactions.
As it stands there are only around a hundred or so registered users, but with qubox announcing on its blog that it's launching an official beta within the near future we can expect this number to grow pretty quickly.
Still, I think it won't be long until qubox is going to be facing the dilemma of whether it should look to merge with a larger online presence.
If it does pull this off successfully though just imagine the implications that this could have for marketers – a tool that will psychographically segment your market for you at the cost of a few mouse-clicks.
Comments
post a commentSorry, a quick PS: the qubox Facebook group is:
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2255443111
Posted by John Woods on 2007/07/10
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Hi Carlos, I'm John Woods from Synature, the company behind qubox and qubox.com.
Thanks for the blog post. I think your comments on qubox are very fair. In particular we don't claim that our matching method is foolproof, but we do try to capture as much information as we can about a person's psychology in a very few mouse clicks. If you've ever tried traditional psychometric tests you'll know they can take hours - a qubox only takes a couple of minutes. So it's about providing something useful and scientifically valid without asking too much time from the user. In the future we might add an option for more "heavyweight" quboxes that offer higher reliability, but take longer to complete.
Incidentally we do combine multiple quboxes to give an "overall" measure of likemindedness, but we keep the individual scores separate too. You might find a person who is very like-minded in terms of, say, Love but who has very different tastes in Music. We think that's an interesting level of detail that we want to make explicit for people. Our new beta site is a bit clearer in the way it handles multiple qubox scores.
We very much agree with you that qubox could work well as a Facebook Application (what a fantastic platform Facebook are providing for us third party developers, I wish their competitors would catch up!) and we hope to have an announcement about that Real Soon Now... (Check out the qubox group on Facebook for a bit more info.)
We are also developing new functions that are layered on top of the basic people-matching function - for instance we are just about to launch a blog-matching tool that gives qubox users a amalgamated RSS feed of new blog posts by likeminded people. I think you are registered on qubox.com so you should see our notification email about that in the next 24 hours or so. We aim that the blogfinder, and other things in our pipeline that layer functions on top of the basic qubox matching process, will help to increase long-term engagement.
You tried our alpha version a few weeks ago and we're now live with our beta - it would be great to have any further feedback if you have time to give the new site a spin!
Find out if we think alike at
www.qubox.com/doyouthinklike/john
Posted by John Woods on 2007/07/10