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Today Samsung told me that a guy I dated in high school is an Olympic track and field hopeful.
The Korean tech giant enlightened me with its cool new Facebook app, the Samsung Olympic Genome Project. The grandiose name and Samsung's insistence on calling it an Olympic "family tree" aside, it's essentially Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon for the Olympics.
Samsung showed off the app in the Big Apple today to mark 100 days before the start of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. Samsung's dive into the social media pool comes as the Games, and everyone associated with them, explore ways to connect fans and athletes. The International Olympic Committee promises this will be “the first social media Olympics.”
Samsung CMO Ralph Santana said the company developed the app to help those of us who want to connect with athletes but don't necessarily know how. It's easy to follow big-league stars from your hometown because, well, they're big-league stars. It isn't so easy to discover you know an Olympic archer because, well, who can even name an Olympic archer?
"In the U.S. you follow people on a baseball or basketball team because someone is from your hometown," Santana said. But with the Olympics, "the only people you really know are the ones featured on NBC."
This is doubly true with the Paralympics, which "live in obscurity," said Chris Waddell, a Paralympian who has won medals in track and alpine skiing.
"This is a way to make them more public and see more coverage," he said. The idea is to "create that hometown feeling of support even for people who may not be from your hometown."
The app riffs on the claim that each of the 8 million or so people on Facebook is only 4.7 people away from each other. Odds are you're closer to an Olympian than you might think.
Connect to the Samsung Genome Project through your Facebook profile and the app "literally builds a family tree of who you are connected to," said Santana. "It reaches out to the athlete community of about 10,000 past and present Olympians and Paralympians who we have compiled in a database. Some you'll know, some you won't."
It definitely works. I discovered that a high school flame hopes to land a spot on the U.S. track team. I'm also connected, in varying degrees, to fencers, divers and amputee track athletes, all of whom share something in common with my Facebook profile.
The downside to the app is it doesn't have a search function, so I can't see how close I am to Nancy Kerrigan or Michael Johnson. That's a bummer, but to broaden your network, all you need to do is add to your Facebook profile: more interests, more hobbies, more whatever. It all leads to more potential connections. The more connected you are, the more points you earn and tokens you receive to put toward real stuff. I'm fifty points from getting $5 off Team USA apparel. (Score!)
"The beauty is, you can explore the athletes you're connected to, start to follow them on Facebook or Twitter, and the app will curate messages and info about those athletes," Santana said. "There's always a ton of information from ESPN or NBC about Hope Solo, but if you're connected to someone more obscure in your genome, now you can find out more about them."
