They're the questions that make parents seem no smarter than their kids, the riddles that cause bar fights and keep people up at night. What’s the difference between drapes and curtains? How do brown eggs differ from white ones? How can I tell a violin from a fiddle or a theory from a hypothesis? Why does swapping the terms Miss and Ms. inevitably seem to cause insult? Now, with some help from a couple of recent McMaster University grads, questions like those are being laid to rest one by one.
Electrical engineering grad Seralathan Kamalanathan and life sciences grad Sharmila Sanmuganithi have created a website, www.differencebetween.net, to provide answers to these and dozens of others like them. Perplexed parents and befuddled barflies can search the handy online resource for a comparison or mouse their way through their choice of categories: science, technology, objects, business, language and miscellaneous.
The inspiration for the amusing, enlightening and deceptively simple site was sparked by a Seinfeldian dilemma.
“We came up with the idea while searching for information about the difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero,” Kamalanathan explains. “Now we brainstorm topics by using various search forums and question-and-answer sites to find out what kind of information people are seeking. Topics are also submitted by website visitors.”
DifferenceBetween.net went live in May and officially launched at the end of last month. Some 1,500 comparisons, serious and whimsical, have been identified to date and are being researched, written and verified
over the coming months; about 150 paired comparisons are already posted on the site. The duo are also starting to accept ads from various ad networks and major online stores in relevant topics.
Encouraged by the site’s success, Kamalanathan has several other website ideas that he hopes to turn into businesses. Not content to put all of his (brown? white?) eggs in one basket, he has also enrolled in the Master of Engineering Entrepreneurship and Innovation program at McMaster for the coming term. Sanmuganithi works on the site part-time while studying in the Respiratory Therapy and Clinical Research Associate programs at Toronto’s Michener Institute.
“Everybody has wondered what the difference is between two things at some point in their lives,” says Sanmuganithi. “Most of us don’t have the time or energy to start tracking down definitions and explanations. So we’ve done that work for them. A few strokes of a keyboard and they have their answer. They’ll sleep easier, speak more knowledgeably, avoid an embarrassing situation, or perhaps settle a dispute.”
