Mindkin
Mind Over Chatter
Mindkinis the brainchild of a group of CMU graduate students aiming to break the mold of traditional social networking sites. Using principles of gaming, it breaks away from the stereotypes in social-networking and makes social-networking accessible to the masses, including the introverts among us. Many social networking sites today have listings of their user profiles with pictures and details such as field of study for their users to peruse to find matches. The problem with providing users with these details at the beginning is that they form their impressions based on stereotypes: "This person has cool-looking friends, he must be cool." "This person studies computer science, she must be a weird geek." Mindkin circumvents this by displaying posts from our users anonymously for others to "like". With each post "liked", the user gains a piece of the author's profile, eventually getting his/her full picture, user name and a way to contact him/her.
The gaming aspect of Mindkin helps users overcome their shyness in meeting new people and avoids the boredom from perusing endless listings of user profiles while its simplicity appeals to users of all ages and interest levels in games. Its wide usability allows it to be used in numerous settings: in any kind of gathering places whether physical (e.g. airports, community centers) or virtual (e.g. online communities, Xbox Live), from casual (e.g. Starbucks, bars) to professional (e.g. conferences, campuses), as a standalone website, a plug-in to existing social-networking websites (e.g. MySpace, Friendster) or a mobile application. With a prototype already implemented, the MindKin team is looking for graphic and user interaction designers as well as Silverlight or Flash programmers in order to construct a more agile and fine-tuned application frontend.
See Mindkin Poster (1.66 MB)
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MindKin Team:
- Ulas Bardak
Secom Intelligent Systems Lab, Tokyo, Japan
Ph.D. 2007, LTI, SCS, CMU - Betty
Yee Man Cheng
Ph.D. Candidate, Language Technologies Institute, SCS, CMU
Mindkin Presentations:
- Social networks via meeting of the minds (1.14 MB)
Mindkin News:
- CMU News Release: Social Networking Site Offers Arriving Freshman a New Way to Connect:SCS Grad Students Developed Site that Emphasizes Ideas, not Faces
- Tartan Online: Mindkin: Mind Over Chatter
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