PSYCHOLOGY
Friendly and generous. Hardworking. An active personality, with a strong sense of identity. Your perfect mate? Nope. It's Yahoo!
For decades, psychologists have studied personalities to gauge how well-adjusted a person is. But Web sites? The more portals take on human activities like customer service, the more critical character traits - and defects - become.
Or so says John W. Jones, an industrial and clinical psychologist with National Computer Systems. Jones, who began analyzing sites while writing The Virtual Entrepreneur, shrank the four major portals, scrutinizing financial data and news reports. Then he rated them in six personality areas: adjustment, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and "intellectance" (cute psychobabble for intelligence).
Yahoo! scores high in agreeableness - it's service driven. But it's not too extroverted (it is, after all, known for pared-down design). And Lycos? Well, it's intellectual, relying on algorithms to rank sites. But like many intellectuals, it isn't too agreeable.
Jones contends that Excite has buried an extreme personality under boring offerings. And woe is Go. It cobbles together assets from Infoseek, ESPN, ABC, and Disney, and, sadly, it displays the classic signs of identity crisis.
Should the portals care? Well, "Sites are becoming more humanlike," says Jones. "And we relate to humans through personalities."
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