“BarCamp 2016” unconference participants had the opportunity to evaluate the performance of “Truthly.me” social network. The Armenian startup co-founder Alexander Adamyan told in an interview with Aravot.am that it is primarily intended to help people get anonymous feedback from friends and thus become better. He noted that the network was designed for the organizations but they realized that it could create a misunderstanding. “Last year in December, Truthly.me was launched as a means of receiving a personal feedback. Earlier, we had 5000 users plus 55 thousand in 2 months, it is spread very quickly, people were just sharing on the Facebook to know the opinion of their friends and so on … Later, after studying how people use Truthly.me we realized that people are asking for personal opinions, and friends express opinions more difficult as they ask for an opinion about other things, which people cannot say directly face to face but is not about this person. In other words, it could be about organizations, services or any other types of questions, and we realized that we have created a thing that would be conducive more for the customer feedback. This was our last deviation from the main idea. Now, Truthly.me is a tool for the customers’ feedback that enables organizations to receive anonymous feedback from their customers,” he said. Alexander Adamyan noted that they have started from the food industry, for example, the users can know where their friends prefer to drink coffee but they are not going to be limited to this, in the future, the media can learn what articles their readers would like to read.
To our observation that “Facebook” social network has similar services, in particular, on the pages of different organizations you can see opinions about the organization, or recently, the social network has added 5 other clicks next to the “Like” click, which shows the user’s opinion, Alexander Adamyan replied, “Now, there is a global problem that the opinions in the online platforms are not reliable, which means that the trust is lessened. To some extent, people still trust but approximately 10-30 percent, I am saying this referring to Yelp, Amazon, Facebook pages, Trip advisor and other similar sites that collect opinions. The assessment on this in these sites is sometimes not true. For example, Yelp and Amazon sue the organizations that provide paid services of writing false opinions. To avoid this, to create an environment where doing it would be senseless, the basic idea is that you see just your friends’ opinions, that’s it. For example, if they can hire someone from India on the “Facebook” page who would simply log-in and put a hundred five stars and the remaining ratings would be lost among them, we do not have this problem. You see your friends’ opinions, if your friends do not like it, you see it, it’s bad. In other words, you will see the true picture, therewith we are different from others.”
In a number of countries, the police urged their citizens not to use the new clicks of the Facebook for the security of their personal data. We wondered whether the users of Truthly.me cannot have this personal data problem, “We are not trying to target people to understand what opinions they have posted, to show them respective ads and sell. It is far from our core business model. Therefore, currently, I do not see any problem to use their information against them without knowing them.”
Ami CHICHAKYAN
