Why trust strangers when you can trust your friends.

Gig­Park is a new social media / word-of-mouth refer­ral web 2.0 and Face­book applic­a­tion (whew!)

What all that jar­gon means is that if you’re look­ing for a plumb­er, account­ant, real estate agent or magi­cian you have a con­veni­ent place where you can ask your friends (or their friends).

The concept is simple; invite your friends to Gig­Park, and then start ask­ing them ques­tions. Your ques­tions are imme­di­ately vis­ible to your friends, and their friends.

Friends, not strangers. What makes Gig­Park dif­fer­ent is that you have a rela­tion­ship with the people mak­ing recom­mend­a­tions — they are your friends or the friends of your friends, not weirdo strangers who may be plug­ging their own businesses.

When I signed up, one of the Gig­Park founders imme­di­ately became my ‘friend’ (through the magic of pro­gram­ming, I’m sure, since I nev­er met him). Lucky for me, he has 342 friends (every­one signed up to date?) so my query will have some pretty good reach.

To add friends, Gig­Park makes it easy, hook­ing into pop­u­lar online email ser­vices. They’ve also developed a Gig­Park Face­book applic­a­tion that you can add to your Face­book account.

Remov­ing the com­plex and leav­ing the simple, this applic­a­tion is sim­il­ar to the ‘Ques­tion & Answer’ fea­ture in Linked­In. You ask a ques­tion of a trus­ted group and expect that the replies should be of high­er qual­ity, or so the the­ory goes.

My take: it’s a new ser­vice so the jury is out. Gig­Park is still in devel­op­ment, and from read­ing the FAQ, it looks like they’re going to be expand­ing the ser­vice to indi­vidu­als and busi­nesses (they call them ser­vice providers).

Even­tu­ally, I’m think­ing it may have value, as the num­ber of users increases. Then again, when you add more people to the mix, the great­er your chance of dilut­ing the value of responses. And we’ll have to see how the ser­vice pro­viders fit into the mix.

Your thoughts? Are you on Gig­Park? If so, what’s your experience?

Update: It’s only been a few hours since I pos­ted my query on Gig­Park, and I’ve already received one response.

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Gig­Park, Social Media, Word of mouth, refer­ral, trust, face­book