Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Personal Infosphere

Supernova2006 workshops open with a look at the “Personal Infosphere,” and asks: With all the feeds of information that come to us, how do you get your life back? Five companies demonstrated Web services that enable you to aggregate information and collaborate with others who share your interest in that information.

imeem: Dalton Caldwell, co-founder and CEO of imeem, showed how an IM client can be used to gain “presence” online and find out what are other people doing. It becomes a social networking medium when you use meems (groups) to aggregate people around different interests.

eSnips: Yael Elish, CEO and co-founder of esnips described a social service focused on finding people with like interests and sharing content that you’ve collected. People who use esnips want to go beyond sharing and socializing, they can sell things. Collections can be public or private.

Plaxo: Ben Golub, president and CEO, says Plaxo is the industry’s first smart address book. It connects people through multiple accounts and synchs data, so no matter where you access your address book, you can have a consistent data set. When you change an address, your book is automatically updated.

Netvibes: Tariq Krim says the idea of netvibes is to create one place where you can access everything you like. From the start page, you can aggregate your blogs, searches, bookmarks, personal channels, etc. You build your personal portal, using modules you create, or ones built by other users.

Plum: Hans Peter Brondmo, founder and CEO of Plum. Plum gives you a way to collect information, no matter where it is, and bring it together in one place, which you can share with family, friends, colleagues. Plum creates communities of knowledge. When you search for info on the web, Plum indexes it and creates a searchable archive of articles on that topic.

Audience Discussion
Opening the floor to discussion opened the door to every conceivable issue that could be raised in an hour. These are some of the perplexing questions raised by not fully answered by the audience:

If you want to connect with people locally, regionally or globally, how does that affect data structure and tagging? People want to put form and structure around content, but that restricts how it can be searched, shared, archived, indexed, etc.

Does the company that hosts the web service claim the data as an asset? Most terms of service agreements state that the user owns their information, barring copyright issues. The knowledge you applied by making a collection makes that content yours.

What happens when too many people use a social networking tool? The people in your social network become your filter. When you search a social network for information, When the masses start using social networks, the quality of that filter will degrade. Then you need collaborative filtering.

How do you structure services so you can continue to add value? Does the service adapt to adjust from a narrow search among a small social circle, to a broad search among the masses? With all these different ways of getting information, are we simplifying our personal infosphere, or contributing to its complexity?

Does tagging data impose unwanted structure? When you initiate a search, you have a moment of unstructured discovery. There needs to be a seamless connection between the digital realms where data may be stored in both structured and unstructured ways. You can spontaneously discover things because instead of searching for info, it’s being pushed to you through your filter (the social network).

If your data collection represents who you are, just like your collection of books , do you want just anyone rifling through it? Would you pay a premium for a service that lets you have a private collection behind the firewall, and a public collection that takes advantage of collaborative filtering?