Rimzu (rhymes with Yazoo or Kazoo) is a system that lets you know how your friends see you.
You can think of it as a form of Sociometric Test, only much simpler and more fun.

Rimzu is built on top of Social Network System similar to the ones operated by LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster and about a dozen other web sites.

After logging-in to Rimzu, a question will appear on the bottom right of the screen, e.g. "Who is nicer, Andy or Bob?". To answer, simply click on one of the names and the question will be replaced with a new one.

The system will keep asking questions until you had enough. At any point you can stop answering, leave the site and come back later for more. The questions will always refer to people you know, comparing them on the basis of several given traits (e.g. "Niceness", "Intelligence", "Warmth").

The system analyses your (and everyone else's) answers, and using some Math Mambo Jumbo knows how each user is ranked on each trait.

Absolutely not. Each user's rankings represent the sum of his friends' thoughts, but no one can ever know how a specific contact ranked him.

You can feel free to answer the questions honestly. No one will ever know.

No. Your personal rankings are exactly what their name suggests: personal.

The only way for other people to see them without your permission, is by using your username & password. This is a good reason to keep these somewhere safe.

Unfortunately, no. To keep everyone's rankings accurate and unbiased, the questions must be chosen automatically by the system. For the same reason, we don't allow skipping questions.

Rimzu doesn't like ties. If two of your friends rank almost the same on a given trait, choose the one that has just a bit more of it. If both are truly identical, just pick one in random.

If you absolutely can't answer a question, you can try to log out of the site and log in again. The system might give you a different question this time. We encourage users not to do so - there is a good reason why we don't allow you to choose the questions you answer to.

Generally speaking, you shouldn't spend more than a few seconds on each question. The impact a single answer has on a user's overall rankings is almost insignificant by itself.

You must have at least 2 contacts for the system to generate questions for you. If you don't see a question yet, simply invite more contacts.

The system won't let you see your personal rankings until you've been ranked by at least 5 different users. This is done for two reasons: to make sure the rankings you receive are indeed accurate, and to make it impossible for you to know how a specific friend ranked you.

If you don't see your personal rankings yet, simply invite more contacts or ask your existing contacts to answer more questions.

Each day, Rimzu provides you with the most accurate rankings available. As time goes by and more users rank you, the system knows more about you, and so the rankings you receive become more accurate. Your personal rankings graph expresses this notion.

The black line for each trait is the best educated guess the system can give you. For example, if your black line for "Niceness" points to 75%, it means that your friends perceive you as nicer than 75% of their friends. If the black line points to 50%, the system's guess is that your friends perceive you as average in this trait.

The green block, on the other hand, gives you a 95% confidence interval, and so expresses the margin of error the system allows itself. For example, if the green block goes from 30% to 65%, it means that your true ranking is somewhere between these numbers. The smaller this block is, the more certain you can be that your personal rankings are a good representation of how your friends see you. When you join Rimzu, the green block will take a significant portion of the scale, and should narrow down as more users rank you.

The system compares you to the group of people close to you, which consists of your friends and their friends. This relative ranking is the one that matters, because these people are the ones you actually come in contact with on your day-to-day life.

It's important to understand that your personal rankings say nothing about how you rank compared to the general population. For example, Albert Einstein might have received an average "intelligence" ranking (~50%), had all his friends (and their friends) been Nobel Prize winners.

Rimzu generates the questions so that the more questions you answer, the more questions others answer about you. So, ranking your friends makes your personal rankings more accurate.

In practice, ranking is very quick and answering just a few questions a day is more than enough.