And they’re back: Andreas Degenhart, Peter Wehner, Jürgen Gerleit, Norbert Schauermann, Andreas Hauenstein – after the collapse of their social network Lokalisten, which they sold to ProSiebenSat.1 about three years ago, they are back in the net. Their new project child is called Finderia, a social directory which doesn’t solely focus on recommendations and ratings but also on the ratings from friends.

The Lokalisten crew reported that they took a try at real life after their social network and discovered that nothing is more true than the advice of good friends, who are there through thick and thin. – Five internet freaks on the quest for the wisdom of their friends. It’s easy to imagine what came next: bang! the quite offline mode was terminated, they jumped on their computers and began with their arts and crafts. And now, after the start of Finderia, they have the answer to how one goes about getting the quickest advice from friend to friend. On the recommendation platform, one can see which doctors, restaurants, bars, handworkers, and other service providers friends would recommend. “The world, and especially the internet, is full of people who are looking to give advice. But I can analyze this advice best from my friends,” stated Norbert Schauermann, one of the Finderia founders.

This is how it works: first you’ve got to register, which can be taken care of by either filling out a standard registration page, or by connecting through your Facebook account. By linking through Facebook, your friend list will automatically be accessed. Then, you can begin searching through the approximately five million entries over handworkers, doctors, hotels, etc. that friends can recommend by clicking the “Find-ich-gut” (Eng. “I like it”) button. Immediately, friends can benefit from their peers experiences. For those looking to visit a good restaurant, discover a good plumber, or something else, they can access the recommendations of their friends: in the result list, more than just the recommended services and places from friends appear, simply because that would leave users with basically no results. But those results are the first on the list, then the recommendations from other Finderia users follow immediately, and then other locations that a relevant to the user’s current location. If there are no recommendations nearby, then users can ask their friends directly for advice using the “Ask Your Friends” tool.

It’s a nice idea, the platform is modern and doesn’t have any frills. But this certainly doesn’t mean that Finderia can avoid a flop like Lokalisten. User rating portals have a good holding, especially in the local search field: golocal, Qype, meinestadt.de & Co. And Google doesn’t just have a rating community with Hotpot, but also displays ratings from friends direct in search results. But we certainly wish team Finderia all the best.

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