Wowd is a people-powered network for search, discovery, and recommendation.
Let's start with discovery: Wowd shows you the hottest web sites, ordered according to rising popularity. This allows you to discover new sites, new pages, and interesting new things on the web before most other people even know to go searching for them. You can control what sorts of content you see in the Wowd hotlist, and you can also search for specific content within it.
Wowd also offers recommendations for content that fits your interests. If you like rock climbing, then Wowd will recommend rock-climbing-related sites and pages to you. Just like Amazon is able to recommend products you might like, based on stuff you've looked at (and purchased) in the past, and just like Netflix is able to recommend movies you might like based on movies you've rented in the past, Wowd is able to recommend great web sites based on things you tend to like. You don't need to vote for anything, or fill out complicated forms to express Who You Are. You just need to be yourself and look at stuff you like -- Wowd will confidentially and securely recommend things to you, right on your own computer.
With integrated discovery and recommendation, Wowd surfaces content on the web that you probably wouldn't even think to go searching for. But once you see it, you'll like it, and be able to look for more things that are similar to it.
So... what does it mean for Wowd to be a 'network'? Technically, Wowd uses a peer-to-peer architecture (often written 'P2P'). This means that it puts people in control -- information that belongs to a person never leaves that person's computer. With Wowd, personal information is never stored in some centralized data center.
One of the benefits of this architecture is that Wowd can truly scale to the size of the Internet itself... the P2P architecture of Wowd is designed to accommodate trillions of web sites and URLs... so join us and work with us to achieve this sort of scale!
Wowd will be launching publicly later in 2009. Until then, we're in an invitation-only beta program. It's important that we launch with a service that meets your needs. If you're a search, discovery, and recommendation enthusiast, or if you love P2P architectures, then get in touch and we'll try to give you access in the invitation-only phase.
Of course, you can follow-us on Twitter and you can also find us on Facebook. Heck, if you're into email, you can even sign-up for announcements from Wowd that way. Our founder, Borislav Agapiev, also writes a blog on Distributed Search, and you might want to take a look at that. Finally, at our web site, www.wowd.com, you can be asked to be notified of our launch.
Onward ho!
