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CubeDuel is Like FaceMash for LinkedIn and It's Twisted

January 13th, 2011
CubeDuel is Like FaceMash for LinkedIn and It's Twisted

A new startup called CubeDuel accesses your LinkedIn work history and then pits present and former co-workers in Hot or Not style battles. "Who would you rather work with?" the site asks, assuring you that no one will ever know who it was that voted on the duel. The end result is a leaderboard of the most (and least) desirable people to work with at a given company. It's a lot like the online college beauty contest Mark Zuckerberg got in trouble for before building Facebook (FaceMash) but for the workplace.

It's absolutely perverse and it's likely to be huge. This crude pointing at one or the other person, flash judgements regarding a person's relative desirability, is like a car crash of interpersonal psychology. It's also quite compelling. It gets easier and easier after each click.

According to a profile of the site yesterday by blogger Louis Gray, CubeDuel was started by Tony Wright, the former founder and CEO of YCombinator-backed RescueTime, and Adam Doppelt, cofounder of Urbanspoon. I found the service via a Tweet by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

Person A: "I see your CubeDuel score isn't very good." Person B: "It's just that I've worked at incredible companies with freakishly fabulous people, I swear. This company seems filled with people who are probably better to work with than I am as well, but I'm still great to work with. I'm sure I'll be better to work with than many of them, but I wouldn't be so presumptuous to assume all of them. That's a great tie you're wearing, by the way."
To give the team behind CubeDuel some credit, they certainly have found a thought-provoking way to make use of LinkedIn data. It really makes you think about how you feel about your co-workers. Who wants to do that, but for nastiness? It's impossible to pick two winners, just to skip the duels - which I find myself clicking over and over.

ReadWriteWeb staff hacker Tyler Gillies says there ought to be a GitHub equivalent for developers to vote who they'd rather collaborate with - but I'm not sure this kind of service ought to exist at all, for anyone.

In some cases, I'd rather work with Deane Rimerman than with former ReadWriteWeb writer Jolie O'Dell. But for other types of work, I'd pick Jolie in a heartbeat. CubeDuel is too cruel to let me say "it depends." Am I just suspicious out of fear that my own co-workers will vote me down for being overly critical? I can certainly get things done! There ought to be a way you can plead your case.

What do you think, is this an interesting application or social media gone mad?

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Marshall Kirkpatrick was a Senior Writer at ReadWriteWeb from 2007 to 2012.
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