My OperaHELPING PEOPLE COME APART
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 8:18:52 AM
Craig Urquhart is an entrepreneur like those who were in fashion some years ago, when a big idea in the internet plus the ability to make it work could make instant millionaires. Craig came a bit late, at a time when investors are more cautious about the allure of radical internet gambles, but, remarkably, has managed to bring the old days of online novelties back. His big idea: a network to find enemies www.WitsYerProblem.com. Unlikely as it sounds, his idea is already successful, and several thousands users are paying for his find-an-enemy online service.To explain it better, our reporter Julian Orwell interviewed Craig himself, who is unusually keen on explaining the details of how his enemy-finding platform works. An advocate of the open source movement, he claims that if an idea needs secrecy to work, it is not such a good one; he invites potential competitors to develop parallel services and is even open for collaboration.
I am in a high rise scheme in Falkirk, an unlikely place for the headquarters of a rapidly-growing and profitably social network. Passing a room full of wires and electronic equipment, where young folk get busy installing some kind of new component to the cluster that works as a server, I get to the surprisingly tidy office of Craig Urquhart, who looks like an average graduate from a Scottish university. He invites me to have a chat over a cup of tea with soy milk (does not have real milk) and a shortbread.
J. O. - I would like to begin with what strikes me as the most mysterious aspect of your idea: Why do people want to actively and purposefully look for enemies? Is life itself not a never-ending source of those?
C. U. - I could have not guessed it either, but after discussing the nature of trolling on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and online forums, I found that people had a strange need to be challenged by worthwhile enemies. Maybe we could offer them that.
J. O. - So are you offering a dating service for making war and not love?
C. U. - hahaha well it did not have anything to do with dating services, or how they work, at the beginning. It was intended to help you find fights to pick on the web, a meta-search engine to find outrageous stuff. But it eventually evolved towards something more interesting, and we then adopted approaches from dating services and social networks.
J. O. - How do you find outrageousness in the web? Can a system do that for you?
C. U. - It is quite difficult really. Finding content on a topic is already a challenge, and outrageousness is an even more difficult concept to grasp for a computer. We first had to find online discussions on a topic in the range of interests of our user, then find writing styles characteristic of heated discussion, and then go for the outrageous comments, which are very similar to sensible comments, lexically speaking.
J. O. - You said that it changed towards something more interesting. What do you mean?
C. U. - Well, my friends that were using the system got hooked on it; they kept using it over and over. It became handy for us to create profiles for them, and keep some indexing and base information that made subsequent queries more effective. That is where *the enemies*, as entities recognised in the relevant context, emerged as individuals, also with a profile and inferred relations.
J. O. - So you do not log in or create a profile to be a targeted enemy?
C. U. - Not at all. We request very little information from our users and none from potential enemies. The system learns by example: our user gives examples of comments he or she has made on different sites, and we create a profile from that. Then the system starts a long process of crawling the web; it detects entities and gathers information about them. Then it presents the user with a list of ranked potential enemies, and asks questions to refine this ranking, and repeats the process with better information.
J. O. - What kind of questions is the user asked?
C. U. - Mostly, about the identity of the entities, which is a tricky business. It is very common for a person to comment with different nicknames, and it often happens that the nicknames of several people coincide. The user can help sort this out. "Do you think these persons are the same?", But also the user has to help us clarify topics and positions, and given enough information, the system can be made competent in recognising positions in the relevant topics. "Are these persons commenting on the same topic?" "Do these two persons agree?" "How strongly do they disagree?"
J. O. - So, as an internet enterprise, how does WitsYerProblem.com work?
C. U. - You can set up an account for free, give us some examples of your ramblings in internet, and we will give you a preliminary ranking of enemies. We show how this would be further improved (with unrelated examples) and charge you an initial fee for keeping track of your fights (we also keep record of what you comment, which can be quite handy for you) and then a very small monthly amount to keep doing that. If you stop paying, we offer you the complete record of your activity as files to download before erasing them from our system, which happens in two months time, but can be delayed if you want to resume later.
J. O. - Well that sounds like a good idea, and not as dodgy as one might think. Congratulations for your success, and good luck.
C. U. - Thank you for your interest.
