Over the past couple of weeks, personal-goal startup Dorthy.com quietly rolled out a major upgrade, just in time to capture your New Year’s resolutions.
The company behind Dorthy wants you to use the site to make — and keep — your personal resolutions for 2010, and more generally all of your long-terms goals.
Dorthy hosts what it calls dreampages. Members set up a sharable dreampage with an avowed personal goal, whether it’s “build wells in Africa” or “date a cougar.”
Afterwards, the site automatically adds articles, photos, videos, and status updates to your page, based on what it knows about you. The page becomes a bookmarkable record of your progress toward the goal. For well-understood goals such as “run a half marathon,” it’s easy to understand how a page of collected articles on training and running specifically a half-marathon, not a full one, could quickly surpass those found on the first page of a Google search.
You also get a news feed of notes and plans posted by other members.
I spoke on the phone with COO Jordan English Gross and CTO Jim Anderson. Thanks to modern sputtery phone service, I had trouble tracking who said what. So I’ll paraphrase.
Dorthy’s own goal is to create a way for Internet users to “move beyond search.” Anderson spent years doing speech recognition research for IBM before moving to About.com, where he focused on search engine optimization and the creation of About’s topical niche pages.
If you think about it, he says, a large number of people search for the same things every day to see what’s new. Dorthy’s pages are designed to hopefully remove the need to re-Google a favorite topic every day. And by finding people whose goals intersect with yours, you can quickly create a collaborative page of your collective, collected knowledge.
Search keywords are, despite their power, a limited way to find information. Human-curated pages like those at Mahalo let people use their own smarts to cluster like with like. The Dorthy team see their dreampages the same way: Because a human being associates each piece of information with a dreampage, that info needn’t match specific keywords to be added to the page’s collection of resources.
How do they make money? First, the company plans to sell market research culled from its members’ behavior and pages. Second, it plans to sell aspiration-targeted advertising onto the dreampages, which have clear potential as a place to bring people and brand advertisers together. Imagine the obvious sponsors for a page about wanting to run a half-marathon, or to do good in the Third World. Brand managers in particular like these sort of aspirational, topical pages, as opposed to trying to guess what keywords to match on Google.
Dorthy, founded in New York City in 2007, has received one round of $4 million in funding from the Coyne Group and various angel investors.
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