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 teamswork 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?
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
“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?
7 Comments:
Any science is best straight from the source, a peer-reviewed Medical or Science Journal.
It would be great to get recommendations from industries as a whole, not just individuals.
The wisdom of crowds.
The answer is very tasty.
Delicious!
Excellent points. But the larger question is "Should Touchstone be getting it for you"? OR, do users need MORE to read? ;)
Yes, but I'd like the ability to turn it off as well.
Optional feed "seeking". Mmmm i like it.
To me, source definitely matters! At least the ability to get the source if I want. Particularly for certain types of info (medical, stats, financial...). On the question of recommending other sources, other "similar" sources would be valuable (ie, reliable publication vs rants). Tough but if well done, it builds your feature set of what I think of as "reverse google" apps. Where only the good stuff finds YOU.
I am a long term user of Touchstone and have found that I do not care what the source is when in touchstone, I glance at the information that is presented to me - quickly work out if it is important to me at this moment or not and act upon it.
Sandra - the source of the news is always visible to you in touchstone (when using the built in adapters)
I would like to see Touchstone add a suggest feature, but I think that it should recommend to me that this other source of news may be of interest to me as well since you have acted up many sources of similar information. But I think that it should be a suggestion rather then just happening.
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