Jijija is a personalized and highly interactive online platform for users to share their opinions, read/discuss topics that match their interests and meet new friends through meaningful conversation.

Looking beyond at how they described the service, the first thing a user will notice is that this is a discussion forum, but once you start using it, you’ll realize there are some social network aspect to it (think Digg). It’s pretty straight forward, members post any topic they wish and people can reply and favorite (called MatchMe) the discussions. MatchMe is a part of their matching technology and it analyzes the members and the discussions they view and participate in and it matches them with other similar or related posts that’s being discussed, track the existing ones they’ve viewed and recommends other members with similar interests, ensuring the members see what they want to see. They also use the “MatchMe” function to popularize the discussions.

As a user, you’ll notice there are the standard discussion forum and social network features, such as, categories (called channels) that users can create and subscribe to, tags, importing from address book (from Yahoo!, Google and others), Digg discussions, friends network and posting notes to individuals and friends. Members also earn points along the way for participating and inviting others, but I was unable to find out what the points are for, other than it tells other members that you are sociable or you spend way too much time on this service. At the moment, you won’t find any ads on the site, not even Google AdSense, which is a surprise, but they are working on delivering targeted ads in the near future.

They just launched both a US version and a Hong Kong version with Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Once you register, you can switch between the two sites (assuming you are bilingual) and accumulate points from participating in both sites but the discussions and matches are kept separate.

Will this be the next form of discussion forums? The service is still in its infancy and remains to be seen but it does provide a more social experience to the current discussion forums.

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