Online sites are launched every day by hundreds, new ideas of online products are being seen everywhere and the latest is called Supermanket.

The name looks funny but when you take a closer look you realize what it is about, a website where women of the world are the clients and the products are simply men, in another term, a dating site.

The service started in Chile two months ago, and has so far acquired 5,000 users. There have been 2,116 purchases by women, with 45% rate of acceptance — where the “product” wrote back. A U.S. version of the service launched last week.

This does not mean you are buying a man to become your slave, as the FAQ of the site is saying, they just want to open of line of communication between men and women

In my opinion, the idea has lots of traction and it should move on smoothly among single women as they are launching the initial communication/contact with the product/man they buy and are not harassed by unwanted people unlike other dating sites, in the meantime, most men will be thinking twice before sharing themselves as a product on a shelf, sorry this is not me typing, excuse my ego!

Location-Based services invaded all over the internet and everyday, more and more service are popping up,without forgetting the fierce competition coming from the big players like facebook, twitter and google who are also offering location check-ins and places.
The few that made big buzz when launched are foursquare and gowalla.

I still don’t see the usefulness of such services for individuals. Would I really care if you are having a burger at McDonald’s or sipping a coffee Starbucks or wherever you are now??? If you think I really care which badge you unlocked or that you became the mayor of banana land, then you are totally wrong?

But maybe I would care to know that the location/store/restaurant/supermarket/pharmacy/etc.. has a special promotion today on one of their products.

Which takes me to the conclusion that the so-called “lo-so” are more useful to businesses to attract more people to their locations, and these consumers to spread the word about their offers/promotions when they check-in using the location based services and in return to be rewarded more when they do so on social networks.

For example, take a look at the below graphic showing 15 check-ins. All of them are useless, putting more noise on the twitter timeline and taking us no where. Until now, I still did not see people checking-in and offering any value to their friends or to the location where they are (I am talking at least about the people I follow on twitter).

So businesses who believes in social media marketing, have a long way to cross.

Why would you use Quora over Convore or vice-versa?

Robert Scoble

I don’t think it’s an either-or. I’d add Namesake into this question too (Namesake has some advantages over Convore, but that’s for another question to answer).

But the two are VERY different, even if on the surface they look similar.

Let’s look at how they are different:

1. Quora is a knowledge repository. Convore is a chat room.
2. Quora’s design and mission affords long text. Convore affords short back and forth snippets of text.
3. Quora forces real names and real identities. Convore starts with your Facebook or Twitter identity, but lets you use a “handle” so it’s hard to figure out real people’s names.
4. Quora creates a feed of your activity (which is why I was fooled into thinking it was a next-generation blogging platform). Convore doesn’t have such a thing and even if it did it wouldn’t make sense because your participation in Convore is back-and-forth chat and one single bit of participation wouldn’t make sense out of context.
5. Quora is keeping a really interesting reputation score (and I theorize a lot more, too) about you. Convore is going to have a tough time doing that because let’s say I left a really great note in the middle of a multi-thousand message chat room. How would Convore know that it was great? There’s no way to signal to the system that it was.
6. Quora rewards great answers, which makes it defacto elitist. Convore lets everyone participate equally, unless you do something so egregious that you get kicked out.
7. Quora, because of its system that votes good answers up and bad answers down, will have a lot less noise. Convore will have the “Chat Room Problem” which is, the masses are asses and when you let them have equal billing you get a ton of noise. Just look at this one thread: https://convore.com/techcrunch/c… See all the noise in there compared to Quora?
8. Quora is better for “day after” conversations where Convore is better for “in the moment” conversations, thanks to its live chat.
9. Quora will have better SEO for your participation there than Convore will give you (because Convore won’t be able to separate out good answers from noise).

So, for me it’s not use one over another. I’ll use both side-by-side.

That said, I think Quora has more value long term and I believe advertisers will want to put their messages onto Quora (and will be able to a lot better because of the deep content here) more than they will want to participate in Convore which will look messier and more chaotic (brands tend to avoid those places).

Vincent Turner

I would use Quora over Convore as Quora affords people time to consider, draft, re-word and then publish their answer.

I can only see this making for richer, more wisely considered and researched responses.

People who contribute well on Quora typically will read and reference other user responses (or part thereof) so you also still have a conversation of sorts.

I think where Convore (capability) will come into its own is when a group of people, perhaps those who are following a question already in Quora, want to discuss individually or a group specific aspects of responses that Quora’s wiki style approach is not ultimately suited for.

In short, I think they would work better together. I also thing Convore are hardly pitching themselves as a Quora competitor and are likely to look remarkably different in even just the next 3 – 4 months as they evolve.

Max Hwang

Convore is more complementary than competitive to Quora. On Quora, the answers are meticulous curated while on Convore it’s more spontaneously written. If you take the discussion from Convore to write the Quora answer, you probably come up with a pretty darn good one.