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<\/a>Over the past couple of weeks, startup Dorthy.com quietly rolled out a major upgrade to the social network’s website, making the personal-goal site available just in time to capture your New Year’s resolutions.<\/p>\nThe company behind Dorthy wants you to use the site to make — and keep — your personal resolutions for 2010, and more generally all of your long-terms goals.<\/p>\n
Dorthy hosts what it calls dreampages. Members set up a sharable dreampage with an avowed personal goal, whether it’s “build wells in Africa” or “date a cougar.”<\/p>\n
Afterwards, members add articles, photos, videos, and status updates to your page, so it becomes a bookmarkable record of your progress toward the goal. For well-understood goals such as “run a half marathon,” it’s easy to understand how a page of collected articles on training and running specifically a half-marathon, not a full one, could quickly surpass those found on the first page of a Google search.<\/p>\n
Dorthy’s own goal is to create a way for Internet users to “move beyond search.” Anderson spent years doing speech recognition research for IBM before moving to About.com. If you think about it, he says, a large number of people search f0r the same things every day to see what’s new. Dorthy’s pages are designed to hopefully remove the need to re-Google a favorite topic every day. And by \u00a0finding people whose goals intersect with yours, you can quickly create a collaborative page of your collective, collected knowledge.<\/p>\n Search keywords are, despite their power, a limited way to find information. Human-curated pages like those at Mahalo<\/a> let people use their own smarts to cluster like with like. The Dorthy team see their dreampages the same way: Because a human being associates each piece of information with a dreampage, that info needn’t match specific keywords to be added to the page’s collection of resources.<\/p>\n How do they make money? First, the company plans to sell market research culled from its members’ behavior and pages. Second, they plan to sell aspiration-targeted advertising onto the dreampages, which have clear potential as a place to bring people and brand advertisers together. Imagine the obvious sponsors for a page about wanting to run a half-marathon, or to do good in the Third World. Brand managers in particular like these sort of aspirational, topical pages, as opposed to trying to guess what keywords to match on Google.<\/p>\n Dorthy, founded in New York City in November 2008, has received at least two rounds of funding from the Coyne Group and various angel investors, most recently a Series B round of $4 million.<\/p>\n![\"Dorthy_Dreampage_VideoList_Authenticated\"](\"http:\/\/www.stoth.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/24df7_Dorthy_Dreampage_VideoList_Authenticated.jpg\")
<\/a>I spoke on the phone with COO Jordan English Gross and CTO Jim Anderson. Thanks to modern sputtery phone service, I had trouble tracking who\u00a0said what. So I’ll paraphrase.<\/p>\n