Social Comparison Engine Meets Cloud Computing & PaaS

One can add the word "social" to any other word in the English language right now, and somewhere, sometime, a group of software developers will turn the colloquy into some kind of a website or application.

Take "social" + "comparison" for example.

In 2006, whileon maternity leave, French-born Vanina Berger (pictured) - a senior software engineer - wanted to compare unusual things such as the best place to give birth. Realizing that it was not so easy to find comparison tables about things that were not products to sell, she began wondering if perhaps what was needed was a comparison engine, a tool that allowed one to collaborate with others to maintain a matrix with a lot of interesting details, advanced criteria such as ratings, etc. In short it would be very nice to have a generic, collaborative and social tool that helps everyone to create easily comparisons...about ANYTHING.

Vanina's partner Alexis Fruhinsholz found the idea interesting and started to work on the project at the end of 2008. The result was SocialCompare.com, a site I'd not heard of until the team behind it reached out to me yesterday to ask if I'd like to use it to conduct a comparative survey of PaaS/Cloud services.

The results are below. Let me know what you think about SocialCompare.com as an application. I am certainly intrigued.