SmoothSpan Blog

I went to try Imagini thinking it was a “Visual Personality Test” based on the Information Aesthetics blog post I’d read.  There’s more to it than that, and I like this crazy site.  It’s another take on the Web 2.0 Personality Space idea I’ve been cogitating on for some time.  What’s different is the extreme visual focus versus something like Facebook.  Ironically, the personality test aspect is where I came up with Web 2.0 Personality Spaces. 

Give the thing a try, its fun.  You’ll be asked a series of questions and the answers involve picking from photo thumbnails that best match your reaction to the question.  At the end, a profile pops up based on your answers.  It’s a really slick looking thing, much cooler than the profile I have over on Facebook, for example.  The interesting thing about it is whether the visuals combined with the personality characteristics float your boat.

When I compare this to my recent experience with Yahoo’s Mash, I like Imagini a lot better.  It seemed fresher and more interesting.  Of course, maybe I’m just a more visual thinker and Mash was too textual.  Andrew Chen recently analyzed Mash’s viral loop and his comment was that Mash makes you work to hard to set up a profile for a friend.  Imagini falls back on the tried and true method of emailing you friends to create the viral loop.  They claim to have 4.5 million folks who’ve signed on so far.  They’ve also borrowed a tactic from my Guerrilla Platform Tactics playbook in the form of Widgets.  They’ll create a custom widget for you which they then encourage you to go and embed in MySpace or yor blog.  It’s a clever way to leverage the investment and contacts you may already have on another Social Network.