Social Networking is an inevitable part of our life today but honestly, it is nothing more than an extension of our Social life onto Web. We prefer connecting to folks who’re real life friends of ours, not strangers.
Our cause of friendship on these social networks is our pre-established real life relations. This is all what Facebook, Myspace, Orkut etc are all about.
Now, it’s time to for you to explore a new social life, purely built around you and everything that’s just about yourself, in a different, refreshing way altogether. Meet Youtego.
Youtego is a Social Networking site that lets you explore and befriend other mates on the site, on the basis of overlapping interests, characteristics, academics, profession etc. This might remind you of Lunch.com, if you’ve heard about it already but the true novelty of Youtego doesn’t lie in Interest based exploration and networking but Self-visualization.
Youtego lets you self-visualize yourself with the use of images. On Youtego, instead of filling out long in-depth forms or answering questions about your interests or passions, you pick pictures from various sources(Flickr, Picasa, Google Images..) or upload it directly, that identifies you, your interests, academics, profession etc. This might not sound that interesting but do it yourself and it won’t take you long to realize how interesting it would turn out to be.
From end user’s perspective, filling out user’s profile feels like a burden at the beginning of any new account at conventional social networks but Youtego reverses the game altogether by making Profile creation, quite a fun actually.
It sparks quite an excitement to even imagine how would a social networking experience be, when everything about you and other mates on that network would purely be symbolized by staggering images.
After you sign up, you get to have six default ‘Tegosets‘(I, I Know, I Can, I Love, My Work, My Education) and you can simply start picking up pictures from available sources and associating them with respective Tegosets. It is all about how you self-visualize and depict it in the form of pictures.
The moment you populate your tegosets with appropriate pictures, you start getting suggestions for matching tegomates, who happen to share some or many traits/characteristics with you. You can then look at their profiles and send them friend request.
You can also create Tego Tours, a basic video using your choosen pictures with a background music and the good part is that you can also share these TegoTours outside Youtego as well. Here’s a TegoTour that i created within my account.
Take a note that you create a Tegotour by using your existing Tegosets only so you got to have some tegosets before you create your first Tegotour. You just need to think of anything that you want to share with Tegomates and outside world and start creating it by adding appropriate Tegosets within the tour. Putting some ‘description text’ is recommended as it would make things more elaborative for Tegotour viewers.
Take a look at this TegoTour !
Branding terminology such as Tegos, Tegosets, Tegomates, Tegotours might not be very intuitive to new eyeballs but as one gets used to it, there shouldn’t be much problems in understanding their meaning.
Overall, it’s an all-new and innovative way of exploring and building interest oriented social relations. The overall website and UI design is pure visual treat to the end users.