TechCrunch has an article on CubeDuel, which takes advantage of the LinkedIn API to allow users to rank their co-workers in the style of Hot or Not. The site creators’ goal is to monetize the traffic and data if they can get sustained traffic, since the information about employees from other worker can be valuable to headhunter and hiring companies.
What is particular interesting in the research context is the time it takes to bring the site up from concept:
Wright says that CubeDuel came together over the course of the last two weeks. Since launching yesterday “thousands” of people have signed up (the site still has pretty poor analytics tools) and over 50,000 votes have been submitted in the last day.
What this mean for economists is that with a clever way to catches the fancies of the internet population, we can potentially gathering data that historically has been costly or difficult to gather. Hal Varian, chief economist of Google, had a speech along this line about a year ago. [PDF]
Source: Cubeduel: Hot Or Not Meets LinkedIn. Your Darker Side Will Love It. [TechCrunch]