"Particls is the coolest thing I've seen in
quite a while"
Marshall Kirkpatrick
"I could even see my folks getting excited about
this"
SuperHelix (User)
"Particls has every chance of becoming [a]
standard"
Michael Mahemoff
Software as She's Developed
Friday, June 20, 2008
Engagd among the top 5 apps in Australia
Ross Dawson has published a list of the top 60 web apps in Australia in the BRW this week. At number 5, our very own Engagd.com - the engine that powers Attention Profiling for the web at large as well as Particls version 2.
This is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the development team. A huge thanks to Ashley Angell, Paul Jones and Jon Cianciullo who have been working tirelessly to manage, build and polish the Engagd platform.
Particls itself came in at 21. That will change of course once we launch the new version!
Thanks to Ross for his hard work compiling the list and including us.
Ashley went to Sydney to demo Engagd at the celebration party. By all accounts it was a big success. Somehow he made a developer platform interesting for a non-technical audience. Good work my friend!
Ross Mayfield, Co-founder and CEO of SocialText, is asking for:
"There is a new kind of aggregator, for more real time attention, that needs to be build to work across status services. I'm not sure if it will be built into existing news aggregators, if existing status clients will evolve into them, or it will be something new. I just know it is coming. It will leverage status service providers and Lifestreaming you find in services like Dandelife and Jaiku."
The video is a great little parody of the information and social deluge we are all experiencing trying to keep up with the million social graphs and applications we are participating in.
Jeff writes:
As real-time social media continues to evolve, I will know where my friends are, what they're facing, if and when they need help, when they have discovered something interesting and many other things they care to share at any moment. The people in my social media communications circle represent a group of people I feel much closer to than some other people whom I've known for a long time but never really have gotten to know. Sort of the difference between a well developed character in a novel as compared to someone whose character never gets really developed.
The parody video is supposed to highlight, however, the lack of scalability for all these social interactions. The mainstream will never participate in all these platforms at the same time. They will likely choose a few key apps and stick to them.
Over time this experience will only get better as the current high "signal to noise ratio" problems that many of us experience get solved with the advent of widely available social media filtering tools which will be able to be applied against the people/topics that matter the most to us.
A filtered stream of notifications is exactly what we need. Thank heavens for my Particls sidebar.
Alex Iskold over on Read/Write web writes once again about the Attention Economy. He eloquently describes the state of proprietary Attention silos and the need for open standards and APIs for capturing and remixing Attention Data and profiles.
He rightly points out that APML could be a key driver to bringing about a more open and transparent ecosystem.
The APML Workgroup is still growing and the first round of APML supported apps are now well underway starting with Particls, then with Engagd and with Dandelife, Cluztr and iStalkr (using the Engagd API).
It can also be set to "Auto-hide" so that it takes up less space while keeping users informed.
It is now the default output adapter for Particls. It joins the Ticker (now disabled by default) and Popup Alerts as part of the bundled set of adapters.
Nick Hodge, a Professional Geek at Microsoft says "I think Particls just changed my life. I've replaced my Microsoft Windows Vista Sidebar with this new version of Particls. Having Particls watch the web for me keeps me on-the-ball, more than caffeine. Well, almost."
Experience your news, alerts and updates like never before. Subscribe to your feeds, type in your interests and watch them stream in like a slick river of news.
Got a better idea? Write your own output adapter. Particls is the best Alerts and Attention Management Platform around.
"We need a tool, an assistant, that understands our processes, understands what we are doing, when we change tasks and when we finish them. It needs to be with us everywhere - on and off line and on the go. As much as possible, this tool needs to help us juggle our tasks and restore the context, recall and store information and make our life easier for us. This is not Artificial Intelligence, this is basically a glue for all the things that we are trying to juggle and ways we are trying to juggle them."
Do you think we are cool? Of course the least cool thing you can do is say you're cool. So we would never say we were cool. That would just be uncool. But maybe you can say it for us?
The issue of Brand Monitoring is one of those things that is super important, but super hard to get a grasp on. There are tools that measure influence like BuzzLogic and others that let you search for blog posts like Google Blogsearch and Technorati, but a tool that monitors the conversation and alerts you in real-time seems to be hard to come by.
Recently, more and more people are talking about Yahoo! Pipes for brand monitoring. It's not a bad idea. Pipes is a great tool for assembling complicated RSS pipelines and could, with quite a bit of work and understanding, be used to get a pretty good brand monitor going.
Or you could use Particls. Particls is like a Yahoo Pipe dedicated to monitoring topics of interest. Your brand is definitely of interest. So is your high profile/visible staff, and your competitors, and their products, and your suppliers, and their brands.
You want to know everything about everything related to your business so you can react quickly and decisively.
Manufacturers, VCs, Lawyers, Retailers, Startups - you name it. Brand and Business Monitoring is critical.
So don't just think of Particls as your solution for the latest Paris Hilton news - it can also get you the latest M&A news - right along side Flickr photos from your kids.
We actually use Particls to monitor news and chatter about Particls. Many people are actually surprised at how quickly we respond to blog posts and tweets as a result.
The latest version of Particls has lots of nifty enhancements and improvements however I wanted to bring your attention to one in particular.
There is a setting in the 'Skins and Settings' property sheet called 'AutoupdateType'
From now on, we will be pushing 'Experimental Builds' first, then Minor Builds second, then Major Builds third.
This means if you consider yourself a hardcore tester and true Particls fan, you can get more updates, earlier, by using the 'Experimental Builds' setting. This exposes you to more risks (as far as using Beta software goes), but it also means that you can get in early and have your say on bugs and features
It also means that if you are a user who prefers to keep a stable, smooth operation, you will see less updates and less hickups in your Particls experience!
Thanks to the usual hard work of the Dev team especially Ash and Paul for this one.
You would have learned about this first on Tangler and Twitter.
In it they make the same observations that I and others have been talking about for more than a year.
"User-Generated Content (UGC) Is Not a Fad... Some investors remain skeptical that UGC is more than a passing fad. However, in our recent online video survey, UGC is the No. 1 and No. 2 most popular content category among men aged 18-34 (M18-34) and among all respondents, respectively. Moreover, if we define UGC as page views only from sites such as Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Youtube.com, Wikipedia.org, Blogger.com, and Digg.com (which is quite conservative), we estimate that UGC now accounts for 13% of total U.S. Internet traffic, up from 0%-1% in 2004. Based on these statistics, we submit that UGC is here to stay."
Although using the term UGC is not great, their conclusion sounds very familiar to anyone reading this blog.
"apparent to us that as supply of video content rises, value will shift from content producers to aggregators and packagers of content that can best aid users in finding content that fits their specific interests".
Of course, APML as a way of describing user interests, and Particls as a way of filtering and alerting users about new, personally relevant content, are both key technology pieces to this new media 2.0 reality.
In this build we have really focused on reducing memory, CPU and bandwidth consumption - particularly for new users. Some older users will not see too much improvement but we will work on those next!
We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law.
...
My attention has reached a limit so I have re-calibrated it to make it more effective. I think this issue is an epidemic. We have too many demands on our attention and the rapid success of Tim's book indicates that people will start to cut back on the information they are gorging. If this happens en masse, will it cause a financial pullback? Possibly if ad revenues sag as a result.
No, I think we need to develop new behaviors and new ethics to operate in the new context.
Most people operate on the assumption that the response to increased flow is to intensify what was working formerly: read more email, read more blogs, write more IMs, and so on. And at the same time motor on with the established notions of what a job is, how to accomplish work and meet deadlines, and so on.
In a time of increased flow, yes, if you want to hold everything else as is -- your definition of success, of social relationships, of what it means to be polite or rude -- Steve is right: you will have to cut back.
Who is right? Who is wrong? Maybe Steve is just old and Stowe is divining the new social consciousness.
Maybe Stowe is just being an extreme purist (Stowe? Never!) and just needs to recognize that there is middle ground.
Maybe the middle ground - Flow based tools that help to refine the stream.
Our eye scan handle the sun - but sunglasses are nice too.
Track the '08 US Presidential Campaign with Particls
Note: All these versions of Particls just install over each other. You don't lose your current settings - they just add more subscriptions and watch words to your profile as you go!
'08 US Presidential Race I have created a 08' Presidential Campaign edition of Particls because I am personally addicted to US politics. It even has its own cool skin.
His premise is that we are not necessarily information saturated - that our brains are evolving to a point where we can let the information flow over us and stay continuously partially attentive to many things at the same time. He claaims that this is a perfectly natural change in our concentration and mental abilities.
He writes about Linda Stone - the guru in CPA.
"Linda and many others will tell us it will rot our teeth, disrupt family life, and lead to hair on our palms. I for one am not eager to turn off my devices and pay all my attention to one thing at a time, one moment at a time. There are too many targets on the horizon, too many members of the tribe, and too many jaguars lurking in the shadows for that. In my tribe, we don't do things that way."
I'm young - my brain can handle it for now - so I agree with Stowe (to a point) - however he also writes about Linda Stone's concerns about Continuous, Continuous partial attention having deleterious affects on the body and lumps us Attention people into it.
"[Linda's CPA concerns], along with Toffler's Information Overload (it's driving us crazy, he asserted) and the Attention Economy mavens (free information leads to attention scarcity). I don't buy any of it."
I disagree with Stowe on this point. We "Attention Economy mavens" and our focus on Attention are not antithetical to his ideas about information flow.
Actually I think, particularly we here at Faraday Media and Particls, we are exactly in tune with his message.
Information (particularly news) should typically flow - not pool.
Reading news in a folder/item email style metaphor is not as effective for the mainstream as having it flow by.
Note that I say the mainstream. Many of us early adopter control freaks like to read every item and have plenty of time to bury our heads in news readers. But that is not always the case - not all the time. An information flow (river of news, news ticker, popup alerts) is typically more effective.
Our work in the field of Attention is not about fighting off flow, it is about regulating the flow so that the stream is full of good content.
Every now and then someone asks 'Why don't you build Collaborative Recommendation into Particls'.
In case you don't know, Collaborative Recommendation is when a system uses the recommendation of many people to 'decide' that a piece of content is worth seeing. So, like Digg for example, if 100 people vote that something is great (vote is a word I use loosely here), then it is probably worth seeing.
There are a few answers to that question.
Particls is really about filtering noise out - not discovering new recommended content (even though we provide some of that functionality just to get novice users started).
There are plenty of other great collaborative recommendation services out there, stick the RSS feed into Particls and there you go.
Google's PageRank and Technorati's Authority is already a form of Collaborative Recommendation - it isn't really very new.
The next generation of Collaborative Recommendation is actually something different. Let's call it Collaborative Filtering 3.0 or... Peer LifeStreams + Personal Relevancy
You have friends (hopefully); they have lifestreams (or at the very least RSS feeds from all their social/sharing sites) - plug their feeds into Particls and we filter out the stuff you don't care about. What's left? Stuff your friends 'recommended' that you actually care about. Collaborative Recommendation done right.
If you want to add me to your Collaborative Recommendation lineup, you can find me on Jaiku
Better international support (especially a fix for the input string error many international users were getting)
An about page
Many little tweaks and bugfixes (learn more on the release notes)
Unfortunately our auto-updater process in the last build was a bit broken so you have to download it manually at www.particls.com/download. Future updates should come through automatically via Auto-Update (unless you turn that feature off of course).
Thanks for your great feedback guys - we are listening! Many of your suggestions will be included in future builds.
In the top 10 are many of our friends in the local scene including Omnidrive, Atlassian, Podcast Network, Minti, Scouta and Tangler.
Particls makes the list at number 9.
Ross is also holding a Web 2.0 event in Sydney, Australia on June 6. Unfortunately, despite being invited to speak, we can't make it. A lot of great people are going however - so check it out.
The question should be how can we create and support tools and standards that force open portability of our personal information so we can choose to opt out of a given service and move to another.
This is a blog
about using Attention Data to help users
filter the noise and experience a
personally relevant
Internet. It is written by the two
founders of Faraday Media - the creators
of
Particls and co-authors of
APML.
Who's Who
Ashley Angell: Co-Founder/CTO: Entrepreneur, Code Guru and TV Addict
Chris Saad:
Co-Founder/CEO: Entrepreneur, Media Junkie and Attention Ninja
