Shared interests, surfaced once a month.
Nothing happens until both people say yes.
Most of what ECO does is visible — posts, photos, timelines, globes. But underneath those surfaces, three systems are running quietly, learning who each member is, and finding the connections that would otherwise go unnoticed.
None of these systems track you outside ECO. None of them sell data. None of them show you ads. They exist for one purpose: to make your network more alive by helping the right people find each other.
Every profile in ECO has 22 dimensions — hobbies, music, food, places, career, values, languages, and more. Most members don't fill these in all at once. Profile Pulse builds the picture gradually.
Once a session, a single question appears at the top of your Share tab: "What music moved you? What did you always have on?" You tap a suggestion chip or type your own answer. It takes ten seconds. ECO saves it to your profile. Over months, the picture fills in.
Once a month, ECO's matching engine runs across your network. It compares Profile Pulse answers across all members — looking for meaningful overlaps in languages, cultural backgrounds, interests, and family histories.
When it finds two members who share something specific and significant — the same music, the same language, the same region of origin, the same career path — it surfaces them to each other in the Passions tab. Not as a recommendation feed. As a quiet note: these two people should know each other exist.
For tribal and military networks, matching works differently: it connects mentors to apprentices and Battle Buddies by shared practice category — not by general interest similarity.
Thread Recognition is a different mechanism with a different purpose: it matches an ancestral couple recorded separately by two branches of the same network, and introduces their living descendants only if both sides agree.
Mentor & Apprentice uses this same monthly opt-in matching, aimed at passing on a skill or a language rather than finding company.
As members build their family trees independently — adding people with the names their families actually use — ECO's matching logic quietly looks for shared ancestors across separately-built trees.
Two people in different countries. One shared grandfather. Neither knew the other existed.
All three systems run entirely within your network. Profile answers, match results, and thread suggestions are never shared with other networks, never sold, and never used for advertising — by ECO or anyone else.
Interest matches are suggestions, not actions. A match is shown to each person separately, and no introduction is made until both have accepted. Nobody is told who declined.
These systems improve as profiles fill in. A network where most members have answered 10+ Profile Pulse questions will surface far richer connections than one where profiles are empty. The investment is small. The return is compounding.