It’s far more powerful if a system or website can let a user register, fill out a profile and then tell them who they should consider connecting to. This way, the system generates immediate me-value for the user. As soon as the profile is filled out, there’s a payoff. LinkedIn does a great job with this. You put in the companies you’ve worked at and it presents you with a list of people that worked there as well.

If you’re on a site and put in where you live, what you do, which sports team you support, the system should instantly let you know who else shares those interests. The next evolution of this should be a system that doesn’t ask you to fill out a profile, but rather watches what you read, what you click on, what you bookmark and uses that to make decisions about helping you discover connections that would be of interest.

Relevance discovery is clearly a hard problem, but it should be solvable. I think if you can pull it off, you’d have a site that would delight users because it would present them with information that would surprise and delight them.