With so many new social services rising up, it’s hard to keep them all straight, let alone, take the time to try each of them out. However, one new social service takes a little different approach by aggregating data from existing social networks and utilizing it in a way that helps individuals meet real goals.
The tool is called Goalee and, according to its co-founder James Brown, is a combination of LinkedIn and eHarmony. Although it’s not geared toward either online dating or professional networking in particular, it is designed to help people find the connections that they need to meet specific goals.
“Who you are as a person can help you build new connections,” said Brown. “We pull in who you are as a person and your professional background from LinkedIn and the people that you follow [and] the things you talk about on Twitter… all those things combined to help you build new connections.”
As he explained to us, Goalee is necessary because both LinkedIn and Facebook are effective in bringing users’ existing network online, but can be tough to use when trying to network with brand new people. He believes that they lack a rich recommendation system that helps users discover people they’ve never met, but should, based on their networking goals.
“You can’t really do what we’re doing if you use just LinkedIn or just Facebook,” Brown pointed out.
“We’re not trying to be the new LinkedIn or the new social network for networking,” he continued, “we’re trying to help you have a better experience on the sites that you’re already using by recommending the best people for you to meet.”
In a nutshell, Goalee creates a persona of each person based on the data it has aggregated. From there, users can list goals that they hope to meet. In return, Goalee’s natural language processing matches users with each other, ranking them according to the most common interests that they have.
“It’s all about getting you as quickly as possible to the best people for you to meet,” said Brown.
Aside from its Web efforts, Goalee is also utilizing mobile and is integrating with services such as Foursquare and TripIt. At this point, the service is free, but later this year, it will be also offering a paid service that will give users the opportunity to have unlimited goals and receive unlimited connections.