We’ve been talking up our upcoming beta for the last month or so and that can get old fast…so it’s time to at least start getting things out there. We had a successful period of internal or ‘alpha’ testing (friends & family), so last week we started a private beta to get a broader universe of folks banging on the site.

While we’re planning lots of surveys around multiple domains in the near term, we’re initially providing a personality survey and a music preferences survey. If you’re familiar with us, you’ll know we’re taking a somewhat different approach from some of the other survey/discovery type sites out there.

First, we’re providing a much greater level of detail that you’re likely used to seeing. Your individual personality is assessed on 45 distinct personality traits (based on Big Five Personality Theory) and your music preferences on 14 underlying music attributes (based on our proprietary FUSES(SM) model). You can see your results at that level, or at a less granular level, in the form of what we call a badge. Here’s mine for personality.

What we think is even more interesting is the social angle. We’re not looking to build a social network (think we’d all agree there are enough of those around!) but to leverage your existing “social graph” or your connections you’ve already established on sites like Facebook. With Signal Patterns, after you’ve reviewed your own results, you can then compare and contrast yourself to others - like your Facebook friends - and discover others with similar personalities or preferences: “People Like You.” Here’re some people with similar music preferences to, and how they’re different from, our CTO Giri.

We’re just scratching the surface in this post of what you can do on the site but hopefully this piques your interest enough to check it out. To join our private beta, follow this link and you can register. And most importantly, let us know what you think. Watch this space for more updates and/or check out (and join!) our Facebook page.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.