MyMuv…cool place to track lifestyle changes

MyMuv is a site that attempts to track lifestyle changes and trends. It is currently in private beta and launching next week. MyMuv (as the name suggests) is a place where you can record and share the movements (muvs) in your likes/dislikes with regard to products, brands, places, people, ideas, concepts et al – anything that reflects your persona.

The site has been built by a bunch of internet enthusiasts in Bangalore, who describe themselves as being amongst the daily Dilberts but with a younger and fresh mind. They created mymuv as an escape from the drudgery of their professional lives. They have got angel funding from Netkode Innovations, Bangalore.

The site’s mascot is Treemy, an Asian Arowana fish, which is always muving around. You can create a free account (once the site goes public) and start of by posting your lifestyle changes (muv) and let others decide if your muv is happening or cool. You may post comments and opinions on muvs, keep track of other muvers etc. A muv is shown as “nike ≈ adidas“; if you click on adidas, it means you are moving from nike to adidas, whereas clicking on nike means the other way around. The site’s creators want users to get hooked on and eventually evolve this into a community focused on better lifestyles. The primary source of monetization will be contextual internet ads.

The creators of the site think that mymuv can help people make day to day decisions. There are many other recommendations options on the internet, but they suffer from one fundamental disadvantage- the lack of context. MyMuv works by letting you compare between two specific options, which is what you end up doing in real life situations. Whenever you consider a trend, it means a change. Most things evolve by organic change, rather than by creating something new. So tracking a trend means tracking a change. If more people are changing from A to B in less time, B is hot! (rate of change). It’s almost like a comparison rating zone with an edge.

I checked out the site (thanks Arun for the invite) and I think its visual design is very appealing. The choice of Treemy as a mascot seems appropriate. Overall this seems to be a cool, cute idea and that idea has been executed well. But I am not sure, if you can actually build a strong community around this concept. And if that’s true, it raises questions about the viability of this idea from a business perspective.

Something that strikes me as intriguing are the different applications people are creating to address personal decision making. There are Q&A options like YahooAnswers, polling applications like Zoho Polls, opinion engines like Tezaa, not to forget innumerable kinds/types of discussions boards or community forums. They are all aiming to help users harness the proverbial ‘wisdom of the crowds’ in matters of personal decision making. It remains to be seen if these applications can have a revenue model apart from internet advertising. I think its difficult, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.