In the future there will be far more opportunities to engage with recommendation and other types of systems than we can keep up with – and we’ll want those systems to quickly and easily know about our interests and tastes.

Molly.com is a new system launched today that will allow you and your friends to teach an AI system about your interests and preferences so that it can answer questions about you and make recommendations for you in the future.  The AI system is forthcoming, it seems – but if there’s anyone (beside myself) I’d trust to hold my data about my interests and make it available in a developer platform – it’s co-founder Chris Messina.

If it can’t be an open source community standard like the Data Portability Project from days of old, then a startup with Chris Messina in a leadership position sounds real good.

You can ask me questions via this link. Feel free to try it!

It’s a child of Silicon Valley, more than a year and a half in development, funded by YCombinator, and lead by CEO Esther Crawford (formerly of the awesome Coach.me) and Chris Messina, a serial inventor who’s led the creation of many cool things, including but not limited to, the hashtag. (I wrote the so-far definitive profile of Messina eight years ago.)

Here’s a write-up on TechCrunch, and a better one on Venturebeat – but I thought a bunch of screenshots might be the best way to give you a sense of what the app is like.

The app learns about you through social Q&A, prompted question cards, and analysis of your linked social services. Based on what it learns, it can make suggestions for answers to questions you’re asked – and someday it will be able to stand in for you when another system wants to ask a question about your tastes. Perhaps it’s building a personal version of what the enterprise industry analysts call a “digital twin.”

Here’s what the app looks like so far, click any of these images to see them full-size.  It’s quite nice.