Good.co moves towards personal discovery, not just personality assessment

One of the challenges of developing a product that provides a one-time insight is that they are one-time. There is little reason to return and participate a second time in, for example, an IQ test or other aptitude-oriented assessments. The same holds true with the earliest versions of Linkedin: until there was something more going on there than creating a resume and connecting with people, why would you go back daily? (Unless you are looking for a job or are a professional recruiter, that is.)

That’s why I have been so taken with technologies like Somewhere (see Somewhere is Linkedin for the new way of work), which builds on the idea of a site to share your professional profile, but not in the form of a static resume. Instead, Somewhere poses an on-going series of questions or topics — places you’ve worked, surroundings matter, tech nostalgia, driving forces, projects I’ve been involved in — so that each time you return there are new things to add, and new facets of your personality to explore. And since it is a social network, your contacts and potential contacts are updating, too, providing the second reason — and maybe the primary one — to return regularly.

Good.co, is a ‘self-discovery platform and network for a new generation of professionals looking for more meaning in their careers’ (from their website), or, as I characterized it, ‘a psychometrics-based analysis tool to help people understand what sort of people and companies they should work with’ (see Good.co says I am a Dreamer, and GigaOM is a Mountaineering Expedition). Here are the major archetypes of Good.co. 

Screen Shot 2014-08-03 at 2.06.23 AMThe distinction between the two definitions makes it clear that Good.co is heading the direction that Somewhere and Linkedin have taken: they are adding functionality to convince people to come back to the app regularly.

Along with a well-done new mobile app, Good.co has added a lot of new quizzes to help users better refine their personality profile. Instead of simply telling you that you are an extrovert, Good.co tells you what sort of extrovert you are. And now, the company has a greater emphasis on helping individuals learn more about their ‘fit’ with other users.

One aspect of this shift for Good.co is the creation of new ‘quizzes’ that help refine your profile and your self-understanding.

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And as a part of the renewed attention to connection and exploration of the ‘fit’ between a user and their Good.co contacts, that have ‘check fit’ opportunities, where users can make an assertion about the personality of others.

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And there is an activity stream of updates from contacts, implicitly coaxing the user to click through and learn more about their contacts.

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Good.co also has invested a goodly amount of effort into a gamification system, where users accrue ‘karma’ — points — for taking various actions. I am not a great advocate for extrinsic motivations of the sort that gamification is fixated on. However, social ‘karma’ — a measure of the implicit regard that a user has built up in the network based on interactions with others — is not in and of itself a bad thing. Although I call it ‘swarmth’, to denote the idea that this is a metric managed by the system as a derivative of the swarm’s attitude about the individual.

For swarmth, or karma, to have meaning it must articulate with the system in an obvious way. For example, if a user with high swarmth votes on something, or ‘likes’ it, their vote or like might have higher weight in the system. Think of it as a measure of wisdom, or social capital.

In the final analysis, I find the new design and direction of Good.co very appealing. There is an inherent competition with products like Linkedin, Somewhere, and Good.co, a battle for our time and attention. There are only so many work experience/personality profile/who am I? sort of social tools we can afford to invest ourselves in. Maybe what we need is a meta tool: one that asks as a short list of questions, and then tells us which psychodynamic-profile social network we should use, based on the best fit with our psychodynamics.

Relevant Analyst
Stowe Boyd

Stowe Boyd

Lead analyst Gigaom Research

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