TurnTo is based on a simple idea: Even in the age of the web, friends are often the best source of advice. And when you ask a friend, you not only get advice you can trust (or at least, can calibrate), you reaffirm your relationship with the other person.
It seems like a lot of what happens on the web gets in the way of this kind of real, personal interaction. "Don't worry about your friends — you can get opinions from thousands of strangers!" Hey, we like opinions from strangers, too. But we also like to turn to people we know. So we tried to figure out a way to use the web to actually encourage this kind of interaction. And that's how TurnTo started.
TurnTo tells you when people you know have experience that could be helpful.
TurnTo is based on 2 key principles:
Contextual relevance: If you get a message out of the blue saying "Your friend Bob just bought a new brand X camera", you probably feel like you just received an advertisement. And Bob may feel like his name was just used as part of an advertisement. But if you find out that Bob recently bought a new camera right when you are trying to decide what model camera to buy for yourself, then the same information becomes helpful rather than intrusive. Now you know to get in touch with Bob to find out why he picked the one he bought and how he likes it. And Bob is more comfortable sharing his activities with you if he knows that you are only going to see them when they are really relevant to you. Context makes all the difference. Which is why TurnTo is all about finding ways to connect you with friends who can be helpful "just when you need them."
Automation with control: The odds are excellent that you know someone who has travelled to a place you are thinking of visiting or bought a product you are considering. The odds that you know someone who has reviewed or tagged or blogged that experience online are much smaller. It's just too much work for most of us. So we realized that the only way to reliably connect people with friends who have relevant experience is to automate the process of sharing those experiences. But automation only works if users also have control over who sees what information about them. The key is to provide that control without creating extra work. So we built a system where, with a few clicks, users can specify how they want their personal information to be shared across all the partner sites in the network, and the system automatically follows through. Then we coupled that with tools so users can easily identify and handle exceptions when needed.
For a little more background on how TurnTo got started, have a look at our blog.
We hope this provides some insight into what TurnTo is all about. Please write to us and tell us what you think!