14 DAY TRIAL // TinFinger was launched yesterday to be the user-generated omnibus the market seemed to need. Or, at least that's what its founders must have thought feeling a lack of sites that contain information on celebrities on the web and considering that another would be most welcome.
It is designed to combine encyclopedic profile pages its users have come up with, some aspects of a social network, aggregated news and a revenue share model. It doesn't sound half bad if you're looking at it from the angle of somebody who's pretty bored and into celebrities' lives. When you find out that it took nigh two years to put all of the above together you start raising an eyebrow and wonder where the people that worked on it were recruited from.
Leaving that behind, the site looks decent, the categories are pretty well organized, but the content? it's not there yet, not at the required level anyway. I searched, just like it instructed me, for Britney Spears and the result kind of left me staring at the screen. If you're going to suggest something you'd better make sure that your suggestion isn't one that will probably run you out of business soon. Try it for yourself, see the Mississippi pop star's profile page and you'll understand why I wrote that.
You can edit the profiles that are not yet in place, while at the moment the service offers Wikipedia style stubs of 150 words on the respective celebrities. The people in the database are sorted in an interesting manner and a flat tag structure with tags that are "expressible as RDF triples (subject-predicate-object, as opposed to subject-object)", in the words of TinFinger's CEO Paul Montgomery.
The two years that were necessary for bringing the site where it is now were reportedly spent on developing its own code and engine. It's still too long a time but if the site is to be successful, as the same Montgomery said, it will be to Wikipedia what the latter was to Encyclopedia Britannica.