Interests are an important part of a person’s personal make up. But so often one of the hardest questions to answer for somebody is “what do you like to do”. At OneSpark on Saturday I spent some time with Scott Hooks the founder of Yubixi, the Personal, Interest network, and watched as he asked hundreds of people “what are your interests”. Many looked at him dumb founded as if he just asked why they had purple hair.

Why is it so hard for people to verbalize what their interests are? This problem gets even more complex when you get into a 1:1 setting with a new person be it a guy or a girl,friend, or more. How often have you gone out with friends and met a friend of a friend who jumped into your conversation about football or maybe about your job as a realtor, only to go home and find out three weeks later that they also love playing MMORPG games in their spare time. Maybe they have a mean tennis game. “What else do you like to do” is such an awkward question to ask people, especially if you’re not looking to date them.

Yubixi aims to solve that problem with their Personal, Interest network. Now realize the commas between personal and interest make all the difference in the world.

We’ve given you some background on Yubixi here and here but the meat and potatoes of the new social network is the interest graph.

Unlike other similar apps the social graph is made entirely by the user. If you like indie rock music, nascar, apple computers and tech festivals that’s great you can add all those interests. But do you like them all the same, most likely not. Yubixi allows you to customize exactly how much you like each thing and then it finds people near by to recommend based on your interest graph.

The amount of control Yubixi gives the user is second to none. You can let Yubixi automate the whole process or you can drill down and say you want to rank people it recommends in this order, this sex, and this far away.

Watch the video interview with Hooks and for more information visit Yubixi.com