New social website tempts the inquisitive

The online social-networking world is crammed with websites where college friends, nurses, moms, and even cat lovers can mix and mingle. Tomorrow , a Cambridge company called Wis.dm joins the fray, offering an online hangout for the inquisitive -- a social network where it's not who you know, but what you know.

Wis.dm is a stream-of-consciousness polling site, with people posing and answering thousands of simple yes-and-no questions. The website can find compatible, like-minded people who share views on politics, food coloring, or the senior prom.

"You pretty much know what's in the minds of your friends," said Martin Clifford , the founder of Wis.dm. "But say I've answered 1,000 questions -- who else has? You get a sense of who is compatible with you and start to form a community."

Clifford cofounded Udate.com, a dating website acquired by Match.com for $150 million in 2003, and said that since then he has been looking for a way to tap into social networks. Wis.dm, which received $5 million in venture capital funding last year, has a trust-the-crowd mentality, and will allow people, ma jor advertisers, and mainstream media organizations to tap into the wisdom of the crowd.

But a quick perusal of the website, which has been in beta stage for about a month, shows there are many gradations of "wisdom."

"Do you think food coloring can cause attention deficit disorder?" (No). "Don't you think Wikipedia is amazing?" (Yes). "Do you like pickles?" (Yes).

In a world where a new social network seems to come online every day, the idea of responding to yes-and-no questions which range from insipid to thought-provoking may not seem compelling.

If you trust the Wis.dm of the crowd, though, you get a different answer.

"Do you find Wis.dm inexplicably addictive?" one user asked. Among 32 respondents, 90 percent said yes.

But Clifford stresses the value of the website is that it approaches social networking from a completely new direction. Instead of using the network to manage relationships, depending on friends and contacts to discover more content, Wis.dm uses content to bring people together. Already, Yahoo! Answers allows people to post and answer questions, and social networks such as LinkedIn.com allow people to post questions for others to answer.

The website then lets people find which users had the same answers to questions. It also allows people to click on a user's profile to see a photo and a hometown, comments the person has left, and questions he or she has asked and answered. People can send messages and become "friends" with each other, but are most connected by the web of questions and answers.

"At the very least it's something else," said Karsten Weide , program director of digital media and entertainment at IDC Corp. "We get tons of calls for me-too social networks; there's nothing really special about them. But here, at least it's different. I give it a fighting chance."

Catherine Vann , 18, of Richmond, Va., said she recently stumbled on the website and quickly found it addicting, estimating that she has answered around 3,000 questions in just a few days.

Vann uses other social networks to connect with friends, but says Wis.dm is different. She'll sign on when it's slow at work, or when she's sitting at home feeling bored, to answer a couple pages of questions. "Facebook is more, you know, you're keeping up with your friends; Wis.dm is more like -- this is what people want to know, and this is what's on people's minds," she said.

But even if Wis.dm can attract users to sign up and hang out, compulsively answering questions, the challenge -- as with all social networks -- will be figuring out how to turn page views into profits.

Despite all the hype, few social networks are profitable. MySpace.com consistently ranks among the most-visited websites, Weide said, but has yet to prove itself as a big money-making business, and every day a new social network seems to debut, based around a different interest group.

Th e websites are a potentially powerful way to target ads, because users post lots of personal information on their profiles -- ranging from where they live and how old they are to which bands they like and what brands of clothes or soft drinks they enjoy. But the information isn't yet organized and structured to ensure that the banners and ads are attractive to the user.

That's a problem Clifford says will be solved on Wis.dm, because users are, in essence, creating profiles of themselves by answering very specific questions each time they interact with the website. Eventually, that will allow the company to gear ads to their interests and personalities.

Wis.dm also plans to form partnerships with mainstream media outlets that want to poll their readers. In the future, Wis.dm will also sell sponsored questions from brands.

But will that fly with users?

In answer to a recent question -- "Is advertising just another form of propaganda?" -- 68 percent of respondents said yes.

"I totally believe in the wisdom of the crowd," Clifford said. "If you ask the audience you get the right answer."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.