Early Feedback on Project Statement

Following are some comments I have received from different individuals regarding the project. I will continue to add posts with this sort of feedback so that during implementation I can have a history of all the comments and issues that I should focus on. Feel free to leave feedback on the project here as well.

Identity Guessing:
My friend Adam Rice (and fellow DM student) stated that it would be interesting to make the project a sort of game, where users could follow a person browsing for a few days and attempt to guess what their profile would be. After submitting a guess they would be shown the users actual profile and they could see how their assumptions were either correct or incorrect.

I am intrigued by this idea because it would serve to dispel assumptions about an individual's actions and how that relates to their identity, but I feel that this would eliminate any sense of instant gratification that users might feel when first visiting the site. I may adopt this idea as an option on the site rather than as the core functionality.

Additional Challenges:
Professor and panel member, Fox Harrell, offered these points as possible challenges I will face during design and implementation of this project:

• Not all of a persons online activities will be interesting. Determine how to parse interesting information so that something meaningful can be learned without wasting too much of a user's time.
  
• People will not necessarily want to share their browsing and online experiences. Provide incentive for sharing and browsing.
• Using an index of the dimensions of difference between people, create a method to suggest individuals to users so that interesting and different people will be shown.
  
• Work with Fox's AIR project goals to create a platform/database system for dynamically creating identities usable for many different systems. The structure of this system would be based upon identity and categorization research.