BeatJoe Are You Smarter Than The Crowd?
Harnessing some kind of collective intelligence is a required feature for legitimately (o’reillyian) obtaining a Web 2.0 badge of honor. Even better if a service leverages some wisdom of crowds.
BeatJoe is a new site from Kriftel which lets the users both be part of and compete against the crowd at the same time. It is basically a prediction game: registered users can create quizzes on future events by asking a question and providing a set of possible outcomes as answers.
The best known assumption of James Surowiecki’s wisdom of crowds theorem is the observation that a – diverse and independent – crowd generates surprisingly accurate guesses or predictions if all individual guesses are averaged. The goal of BeatJoe is to bet points on these quizzes and to make better predictions than the crowd which is represented by Joe Average, hence the name of the site.
are we experiencing a new INTERNET-HYPE? – yep, this bubble is going to burst soon! / nope, the business models are solid!
Once the event for a quiz has happened, the creator of the quiz verifies the correct answer and the users who guessed correctly harness the points of those users who guessed wrong. Since BeatJoe is a zero sum game – other users have to lose points for you to win them – it is a fun alternative to the many question and answer sites around. Each month the best player wins an iPod shuffle.
Users also can create private groups for betting on more personal events or join interest groups. The site is only available in German.
