The reorganization around people

Over on Leafar's blog he has made a great post entitled 'Venture with Wit' that covers a number of topics including chasing VC/Angels who have the right understanding of the Attention Economy (we have found it is better to let them find us) and various factors that affect information flow.

These, according to Leafar, include: Content ("Hyperchoice Problem" - I love that name), Identity (An area where we have contributed APML) and Social (at which point he kindly mentions Touchstone as the best example of work being done in the area.)

I particularly like these quotes from his post:

From EquityKicker.

"As I’ve said before to me the web is re-organizing around people instead of sites"

I wrote about this in a recent post called "Aggregation is King"

Another great quote is from Umir

"Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry."

Ultimately though, users don't care about these market forces and factors of information flow. What they care about is a highly tailored experience that saves them time, delivers the right information on the right device and at the right 'Volume'.

If the web is reorganizing around people and Attention is the scarcest resource, then a tool that performs ultimate personalization by indexing, apply and managing user attention must be worth something to someone :)

Touchstone on "A Current Affair"

Touchstone was mentioned on an Australia TV show called 'A Current Affair' last night at 6:30.

You can check out the behind the scenes photos on flickr.

I will try to get a recording posted on YouTube at some point too.

Thanks to Sean who made it happen and Nik for all his help!

Update: Here is the video (I'm just after 2:20)

Aggregation is King

I am finally home from our trip to the US. It was a fantastic visit - the first of many. You can see some of the pictures at Flickr.

But back to the real stuff:

Disclaimer: I am using the terms Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 pretty heavily here. I am aware of the buzzword fatigue that they are attracting these days but these terms give me an invaluable shorthand for referring to different bubbles/iterations/movements/waves.

Aggregation (not Content) is king.

I've been saying this to people for a while but have not really had a chance to blog about it. It actually came up a few times at conferences such as Web 2.0, Web 2.2 and StartupCamp while I was in the Bay Area.

The common misconception these days is that services like YouTube are Web 2.0. This is only partially correct. Uploading your work to a site, rating it, sharing it - these are not new concepts. Sites/Services like DeviantArt have been doing it since Web 1.0.

People are talking about the word 'Community' like it represents the spirit of Web 2.0. Community was one of the buzzwords of the Web 1.0 bubble. It is not new.

The new part is that YouTube lets you embed your video on other sites and access their content via RSS. These are both forms of syndication.

So if syndication is the main new feature (and not community or user-generated content) then the main new tool must be aggregation.

But aggregation is a means to an end. When a user is able to access content on their own terms another much more fundamental trend reveals itself. Personalization.

Every feature typically associated with Web 2.0 (blogs, syndication, rating, digging, ajax) is actually about allowing greater Personalization by putting the user at the centre of their experience.

However the current set of aggregators (with a few exceptions) has a long way to go until they give a user ultimate personalization. Allowing them to choose the feeds they want to read is the most basic form of personalization. There is so much more room to innovate.

While most have focused on the boring folders/items metaphor, and others like Microsoft have created useless 3d representations of those same folders and items, the real opportunity lays in recognizing that aggregation + true personalization is actually the holy grail of this latest web iteration.

Tripping: Microsoft 3D Photography - Photosynth

Over the last few days we have been at the Web 2.0 Conference and the Web 2.2 Conference (apparently there is an upgrade coming out!) and by far the coolest thing being demoed (besides Touchstone of course) is Microsoft's Photosyth research project.

This thing is amazing.

Today at Web 2.2 we talked about community building and how tools can influence, build and disband communities via various subtle and not-so-subtle influences.

My main contribution was the sentiment that the ultimate community building 'tool' right now is blogging. Blogs are many pieces loosely joined and that model is at the heart of the Web 2.0 movement.

We also talked about how applications like Touchstone can model interests in the community to build a profile about which components (people) of a community contribute the most, even when the contribution is only passively received.

Very academic!

The Things I Care About

One of the important distinctions that we often have to make for Touchstone is that a personal relevancy engine is very different to a recommendation engine. It does forma part of the puzzle, but we feel that there is enough recommendation engines out there, but not enough engines which filter down the noise, based on many of the same principals.

Let me share a brief story with you:

Touchstone shares its office with another development team (a start-up doing other…stuff). We all get along very well and the teams work play nicely together. Today I started conversation based on an alert I got from Touchstone. During the conversation (about a possible cure for AIDS) someone asked:

“Where do you get all your medical news? Because I’ve got my Tech news covered, but I am interested in Medical Science, but don’t ever get exposed to it.”.

And I honestly had no idea.

I had no clue, because it was actually Touchstone that told me, and like many other’s when Touchstone is doing its job (which is infrequently because I am always running the least stable and most experimental version available) I couldn’t care less about the “source”. I don’t feel I NEED to know. I replied “I don’t know, umm, prolly Reuters?”

This got me thinking. Does the source matter? How and more importantly should Touchstone suggest new sources of information to you over time? Where does Touchstone stop being a personal relevancy engine and start being a personal recommendation system? Should it start tracking new sources with or without your permission?

Tripping: The trip so far...

Hey everyone - I see that Ash has been a very busy beaver on the blog and with the builds while I have been away. Thanks for that Ash!

Also while we have been over here, we have been mentioned on Read/Write Web in a list of top Australian apps and Real Software Development as the best of the best. Big thanks to those sites.

Here are some pics for you all to see from our trip so far.

The Googlefly Effect (or Google Farts and the World Pays Attention)

Disparity seems to be trailing Google like bad smell these days. I’m not sure if it’s just “tall poppy syndrome” and the recent acts by Google are mere coincidence, but I am not so sure anymore.

As Google has grown comfortable as the powerhouse of Bubble 2.0 throwing away the mantra of early 21st century corporate-political philosophy of: Trust me, I'm [Google] [the president] [your local utility company]; replacing it with a form of commemorative inscription where they have to specifically remind themselves to be nice! Are they succumbing to the weak-ass corruption at the top of the service industry “food chain”?

I personally am tired of how much clout they have, and while I do recognise their place in the IT world, it’s getting tiring, that every time Google Farts it’s a headline!

As a founder of a start-up, and knowing many other people with their own start-ups, it means it’s even harder to get traction and cut through the noise. Breaking down the two biggest barriers for young [self-funded] startups, Mr. Apathy and Mrs. Ignorance. This wouldn’t be so bad on its own, save the latest piles of crap to leave the [Google] Campus, like Google Talk, Google Video, Google Docs & Spreadsheets to name a few. In fact, I would go so far as to say the only good things (outside search and ad networking) Google owns have been outside acquisitions. Overall their latest products have been sub-standard, uninspiring and have diminished the effect of others doing a same (and probably better) job.

I guess all this “Google Bashing” could be a good thing though, it was getting old hating Microsoft all the time ;)