This reminded me of Ambient music. I used to be a bit of a Brian Eno fan - he was the guy who 'invented' Ambient music.

Time to coin a new phrase (I haven't done that in a while). Applied to RSS and blogging, Aggregator Ambience is when information envelops us but doesn't require our complete attention. We let Web 2.0 tools and services, along with our social network and serendipity, pick out the bits and pieces we want to pay attention to. It's what all RSS Aggregator developers should be aiming for, Aggregator Ambience. This is one of the strong points of Rojo btw.

Not unrelated is this discussion of the 'River of News' style of reading RSS feeds. As Dave Winer puts it: "...you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal."

The Ambience and River of News metaphors appeal to me because they are laid-back, almost Zen, ways of approaching the issue of Information Overload. No more anxiety, no need to pore over every single piece of microcontent that flows through your RSS Aggregator. Just chill out and let the information wash over you like a Brian Eno record.

Ahhhhhhhh..... now, if only I could live my life that way! Hmmm, maybe I just need to go listen to some Eno music :-)

Gist, whose slogan is "where your inbox meets the web," essentially turns your email inbox into a more structured application filled with information while prioritizing the emails that are of the most importance to you. To get started, you connect Gist with your Gmail account. You can also upload a .csv file from either Outlook or LinkedIn. The application then organizes your email and the data extracted from your inbox into a dashboard which gives you a brief overview of the most important items.

The Dashboard & People Pages

On the Gist dashboard, you'll see lists of recent attachments and recent links in the sidebar, high-priority emails in the middle, and important people on the left. Those people are ranked by you using the service's rating slider which gives you granular control over the order in which those names are displayed. When you click on any person listed, you'll see a "people page" that highlights your recent correspondence as well as recent links and attachments, just like the dashboard homepage does.

The People Pages in Gist aren't just snapshots of inbox activity. They also incorporate other information like news about that person and/or their company. That news comes from a number of sources from across the web, like Yahoo News for example, as well as from recent blog posts. With that information on hand, you have an opening to reach out to them be it to congratulate them on their impressive launch or to simply say how much you enjoyed their recent blog post.

Got The Gist?

We've addressed some of the problems with information overload in the past - detailing both the problem and some possible solutions. For email specifically, we looked at five ways to deal with email overload, which focuses on methods like GTD vs. folders and rules. We even looked into some of the applications highlighted at the first IORG (Information Overload Research Group) conference, an event held by the new research group whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and others. Unfortunately, no one application has effectively solved the problem just yet.

In a way, Gist reminds us a bit of Xobni (our coverage), the Outlook add-in that "socializes your inbox," by automatically extracting info from both your email and LinkedIn. However, Gist's ability to grab recent attachments is more like Xoopit's Gmail add-on (our coverage) that helps you uncover the images, files, and videos you've been emailed. Gist really combines the best of both of those plugins and delivers its results as a web application. Clearly, Gist's service is geared more towards sales professionals, though, as they need to keep up with tons of clients. However, this intelligent application is something that anyone with an overloaded inbox could take advantage of.

Gist's CEO is T.A. McCann, a Seattle-based former Microsoftie who previously worked in Microsoft's Exchange Server Group, an experience which no doubt familiarized him with the information overload occurring in today's inboxes. The company is backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital.

We Want In!

We would love to tell you want we thought of Gist ourselves instead of just describing its features, but Gist is in private beta, and they seem to be very exclusive about who gets in. We couldn't even get an invite for RWW! You can sign up for an invite here, so send us one if you get in before we do.

Starting out, Marshall discussed some of the usage cases of the real-time Web, ranging from people-to-people services like Twitter and Olark to services that focus on machine-to-machine communication and enable services like Friendfeed and Google Reader. Services like Aardvark, which provide links between people and machines, and machine-to-people services like NotifyMe and PostRank fall in between.

Information Overload

This new river of data, of course, could easily lead to total information overload. In the best case scenario, the tools will get so good that we won't be overwhelmed by all of the data coming at us. In the worst case, of course, we could lose the usefulness of the real-time Web if the flow of data becomes too overwhelming for users, or compromise usefulness in order to reduce information overload.

Standards

As Marshall pointed out, though, we are only laying the railroad tracks for this future of the real-time Web right now. Services like Pubhubsubbub and RSSCloud are currently building the infrastructure that will make these major changes on the Internet happen, though the standards that will make the real-time Web possible are still evolving.

The question, of course, is how these standards will evolve. While some standards bodies are currently trying to create them, chances are that some standards will evolve naturally as certain vendors become dominant.

Bringing the Real-Time Web to the 'Slow Web'

Marshall pointed to Facebook's Global Happiness Index as an example for the kind of product companies can develop based on data created on the real-time web. He also looked at a number of companies like Evri, FirstRain and JS-Kit's Echo that are bridging the gaps between relatively static pages like blogs and the real-time web.

Information Overload By the Numbers

• $650 billion: Annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers in the United States
• 28% of a worker's time is spent dealing with interruptions that are neither urgent nor important
• 6 Hours Per Week: Time lost due to context switching (multi-tasking, pausing, etc) - Does this means the Louis Gray's and Scobles are still few and far between?

Intel also contributed their own internally collected numbers:

• Average employee receives 350 messages per week
• Average executive receives over 300 messages per day
• Employees spend about 20 hours per week managing email, 2 hours of which is unnecessary email

Discussing Solutions

When talking about solutions to the information overload problem, the key areas that were touched on were process, training, and raising awareness. Intel also mentioned a couple of solutions they have implemented themselves - one being the use of "quiet periods" of 4 hours twice per week where people can disconnect from communication and fully focus on getting things done. They also make use of an internal software program called the "Intel Email Effectiveness Coach," that warns people when they're about to do something stupid, like send a message to 2000 people. (Wow - they should sell that!)

As far as software solutions go, Jared provides us a short list of the highlights. Here's what he said stood out:

• RescueTime - keeps track of not just your activities on your computer but those of your office mates, enabling you to see how you stack up and when you're slacking
• Slife - similar to RescueTime in that it gathers statistics about computer usage, but data is primarily kept locally rather than "in the cloud"
• SmartDesktop - Imagine your computer knew what was contextually relevant no matter what you were doing on it. (Private Beta)
• Seriosity - an economics-based approach to email management whereby one attaches virtual currency to their messages
• ActionBase - Turns Outlook into a database of sorts for knowledge management and wiki-like email correspondence
• Talk2Us - Jared called this one a "crazy voice recognition manage-your-life software that's in private beta"
• ClearContext - Helps you to better identify important information, group relevant items together, and generally have a better workflow within Outlook
• Permessa -Enterprise unified messaging for performance and compliance monitoring

Jared himself is also the creator of AwayFind, a tool that lets you get away from email without getting out of reach.

We will take a look at some of these other solutions over the coming weeks here at RWW and let you know what we think.

Image Credit: Autoroute: Mzlle Biscotte

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iorg_discusses_solutions_for_i.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iorg_discusses_solutions_for_i.php Trends Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez

This will be post #1 of 2 posts on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Part 2 is here.

Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.

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This $650 billion dollar problem made the headlines this week, getting write-ups in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Thanks to a research study by Basex, we now have new data on productivity in the workplace. The findings reveal that a typical information worker checks his or her email more than 50 times per day, uses IM 77 times, and visits 40+ web sites. These numbers were calculated by tracking software installed on the machines of the 40,000 people taking part in the study.

Often, workers are dropping high-level tasks to deal with mundane, low-priority tasks that come through via these unnecessary interruptions. The end result is fractured attention where the big loss comes from the time it takes to recover from the interruption and get back to work.

"Productivity" Apps

Although we should know better, it may already be too late for us; we're conditioned creatures who are drawn to these distractions. A pop-up alerting us to new email? We must check it. A flashing IM window? Just try to ignore it. These "productivity" apps, it seems, by their very nature, have been designed to steal our focus.

Big tech companies are worried, too. They've put together a group called IORG (Information Overload Research Group) whose founders include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Intel, and a dozen other companies and academic institutions.

This group's mission is to:

"Conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload."

It will be interesting to see what they come up with as far as solutions because they're certainly not the first to attempt a solution to the problem. Earlier this year, we covered five methodologies to deal with email overload, which included popular techniques like the GTD method and the 4-Hour Workweek Method. Despite numerous proposed solutions such as these, no one has really hit the sweet spot when it comes to providing real solutions that work for everyone.

Social Media Addicts - Sink or Swim?

For social media addicts, which likely includes readers of this blog, the problem can be even worse. In addition to having our focus pulled away by productivity applications like email and IM, we're also pulled in a number of different directions as well - checking FriendFeed, Twitter, social networks, and more. (I wonder how many billions of dollars we waster per year?)

For many people, these distractions are overpowering. No matter the time commitment, social media addicts can't help but spend entire chunks of their day online playing with the new, shiny internet toys. When we profiled several social media addicts earlier this year on Twitter, we discovered that a good many people spent several hours - even as many as 10 hours per day - online, immersed in the web and social media tools.

It seems we're at a crossroads - there's so much information, but not enough filters. We can either drown in the lost productivity time sink that is the internet or we can swim...swim for our lives. The question is: how?

Click here to read Part 2 of this post

Image Credit: Autoroute: Mzlle Biscotte

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/info_overload_the_problem.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/info_overload_the_problem.php Trends Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:32:38 -0800 Sarah Perez Forrester has just released a new report on Enterprise RSS. Specifically it tackles the issue of information overload in the corporate environment, now that RSS feeds are an important source of information in the workplace. Also it covers how IT departments are becoming more interested in enterprise RSS solutions, particularly from 3 vendors who seem to be doing very well out of this market: Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator.

Forrester sent a free copy of the report to Read/WriteWeb, so here is a quick review of its contents.

I think we all know about the issue of information overload - and the resulting value of good filters and smart aggregators. In some ways the problem is worse for enterprise employees - because as well as external news sources, they have potentially hundreds of internal RSS feeds to track via company blogs and wikis.

In the report, Forrester recommends that companies purchase "an enterprise RSS solution". Three vendors in particular are mentioned: Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator. Each of these vendors has an RSS solution that runs behind the firewall. The below diagram from Forrester nicely captures the value that such solutions provide:

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Apart from things like filtering, collaboration and access control, enterprise RSS solutions typically integrate in some manner with existing corporate systems. A good example:

"KnowNow, for example, can effectively "RSS-ify" corporate data, taking important events, updates, or status changes that reside in disparate systems like ERP, CRM, and supply chain management (SCM) and syndicate them to appropriate stakeholders. Wells Fargo uses KnowNow to monitor customer data and warehouse schemas, routing inconsistencies and problems to appropriate business analysts in real-time."

Conclusion

In the world of web 2.0 blogs, not as much attention is paid to enterprise RSS solutions as consumer RSS solutions (Google Reader, Pageflakes, Feedburner and so forth). But if you're looking to introduce RSS into your company or organization, then you should certainly look closely at services like Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator. If anyone knows of alternative solutions, please note them in the comments.

There's also the issue of how RSS is being adopted in the enterprise - and the Forrester report suggests that it still hasn't reached much beyond PR, IT and marketing people. HR and R&D people are showing good signs of adopting it, but comments from the Forrester report such as "knowledge managers will need to RSS enable internal content" [for R&D people] show that there is still a lot of work to be done.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/enterprise_rss_3_vendors.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/enterprise_rss_3_vendors.php Analysis Sun, 13 May 2007 22:50:26 -0800 Richard MacManus Interesting notion of "feed grazing" from James Corbett and Danny Ayers. James actually came up with the concept - this explanation is from a comment he left on Danny's blog:

"I’m actually coming to the conclusion that the whole subscriptions mindset is a problem and that in future we’ll ‘graze’ for the most part instead of subscribing. As Zigbee sensors, RFID chips and GPS trackers proliferate we’ll be drowing in an RSS-everywhere world if we don’t change our approach.

We don‚Äôt subscribe to all the sensory feed in physical world, we sample, nibble, taste, glance. Taskable and OPod (and whatever Kosso‚Äôs working on) are first generation ‚ÄúFeed Grazers‚Ä? IMHO. They allow you to graze feeds without ever subscribing. All we need is for static OPML directories to proliferate and for OPML search engines (like Gada.be) to improve at building multi-level hierarchies on the fly."

Intrigued, I checked out the apps that James referenced. Taskable is described as "a new kind of RSS and OPML browser built into the Windows taskbar notification area." OPod is "an AJAX OPML and RSS viewer widget that you can embed in any web page you like." Uh, right. I'm none the wiser.

In another post, James calls them "on-demand feeds" - which is more grokable. So you only need these feeds for a short time, then you dispose of them... My Auckland friend Charles Coxhead has been exploring the notion of disposable feeds too.

It's an interesting concept and one which I obviously need to think more on - and read more of James' posts (and Charles too, when he gets around to posting about his experiments). 2006 seems to have become the year when we've realised that RSS, for all the benefits it brings of being able to subscribe to information, doesn't actually solve the core problem of information overload. Perhaps feed grazing, or on-demand feeds, is a step closer to solving the overload problem...

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]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feed_grazers_an.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feed_grazers_an.php RSS & Feed Management Tue, 07 Feb 2006 01:53:47 -0800 Richard MacManus Want to escape your email? These days, who doesn't? Email is one of the easiest technologies to use, which leads to an unfortunate side effect: we get too much of it. The information overload crisis has gotten out of hand and is now at the point where it's interfering with the way business operates. This problem is no longer just an inconvenience, it's a real financial concern. In the U.S. alone, $650 billion per year is the cost of lost productivity, according to IORG. But what can be done? ]]>Sponsor

]]> some developers are finally starting to build applications that focus on solving real-world problems instead of simply cloning the hottest web app du jour. One such application attempting to solve problems AwayFind, a tool that aims to win the battle against email overload...or at least put up a good fight.

AwayFind is a clever solution to the email overload problem. It lets you step away from your email without missing the most important messages - the so-called "email emergencies." That addresses one of people's deep-seated fears of email abandonment - the fear that some piece of critical information is going to arrive and we're not going to see it.

Basically, AwayFind is an auto-responder on steroids. You can configure its outgoing message to your liking. That message includes a link which allows people to get your attention if they are, in fact, emailing you about something urgent.

Your message could read, for example:

Messaging me about something I need to know today (like a canceled meeting)?  Please click here to get my attention:

http://awayfind.com/username

But What If It's Important?

Those who really needed to reach you can click the link to be taken to a web page where they can fill out a quick form, the results of which will be sent to you.

The form is not too cumbersome to fill out, but it has just enough fields to cause people to pause and consider whether or not it's really worth their effort. It also includes a CAPTCHA at the bottom to keep the spammers at bay. The form can be configured so that messages are categorized by the sender via a drop-down box (e.g. "Personal," "Business", etc.) and then those messages can be auto-routed to the appropriate person(s). In other words, AwayFind can automatically delegate your email for others to deal with.

When someone fills out the form, you're alerted based on the settings you chose during AwayFind's setup and configuration. You can receive a text message (SMS) or you can specify to be alerted at a different email account - that secret address you created for emergencies only. You can also check AwayFind's online inbox via the web.

With AwayFind, you can finally enjoy that vacation, to be sure, but you can also set up day-to-day templates to manage the everyday onslaught.

Pricing Info

The AwayFind service comes in two pricing tiers - a free version and a Professional version. The upgraded plan is $4.95/mo or $34.95/year and comes with a few extra features like a branding option which incorporates your logo, SSL security, integration with your web site, international SMS support, and more. It works with Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail/Windows Live Mail, Outlook, and others.

Now that you have all that extra time on your hands, you should probably read AwayFind's guide to not checking email (provided for free upon registration), as it will help you stick with your new plan. Remember, breaking email addiction is something we have to fight one day at a time.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/escape_your_email_at_last_with_awayfind.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/escape_your_email_at_last_with_awayfind.php Products Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:15:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Lifestream aggregator-turned-social network FriendFeed is the most hyped thing since sliced bread -- or at least the most hyped web app since Twitter. Among the scads of lifestreaming apps, FriendFeed has garnered the lions share of recent press and hype among early adopters. The promise of lifestreaming is that it can bring all the various activity streams from the friends that you follow at multiple services under a single umbrella, vastly simplifying your information overloaded Internet existence. But do services like FriendFeed really solve the problem, or just highlight it? Can they even add to it?
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]]> We've definitely contributed to some of the hype around FriendFeed on this blog: we picked it as a potential breakout app at SXSW, and we backed it over a competing high profile lifestream app. But given the results so far to this week's poll (you can vote below), there is clearly a big market for lifestream aggregators (64% of respondents say they use some sort of lifestreaming app).

Information Overload

But while FriendFeed and similar services bring activity streams into a single place, making it easier to keep track of your friend's activity, there's still an overwhelming amount of activity for most of us to track. I follow just a handful of people on Twitter, and already the stream of activity is fast and furious. The same applies to the activity of my hundreds of friends on Facebook. Add into that activity from tens of other accounts and you can imagine how quickly an aggregated feed of your friends' activity can become overwhelming.



FriendFeed definitely does some things to alleviate the flow of information. For example, it groups similar items together -- i.e., rather than sending the 50 Flickr images that you just uploaded or the 50 tweets you just made at Twitter to your stream individually, it sends one or two with a link to the rest. FriendFeed also added search yesterday, which is a very useful feature allowing people to see what their friends are doing around specific topics across multiple networks.

FriendFeed tracks 28 services. Profilactic, another lifestreaming application, supports 155. Robert Scoble asked yesterday, how many services do we need? Good question. While FriendFeed certainly makes it easier to track your friends activity at all those services, it also exposes you to all of them. Before if you wanted to follow Joe on Twitter and Facebook, you followed him on Twitter and Facebook. If you follow him on FriendFeed, you also follow Joe on Flickr, and Netflix, and Amazon, and MySpace, and Pownce, and Digg, and YouTube, and every other service he might use. Yikes! (Note: there are some third party hacks to get around this.)

Adding To The Problem

Generally, FriendFeed highlights the problem of information overload, but it also has a hand in contributing to it. We all thought we were signing up for a social activity aggregator, but BAM!, turns out FriendFeed is a social network in its own right. FriendFeed encourages people to comment on items sent through its feeds on FriendFeed rather than on the source site. Some people think this is a killer feature that focuses conversations around all of our activity, while others think that it fragments conversations and could lead to redundancy as a result of "Social Network Switching Decay."

What it really might do is add to the noise. Lifestreaming services like FriendFeed that aggregate our social activity are supposed to be about making things simpler and lessening information overload -- not about adding to the flow of information.

What We Need

In an attention economy information overload is a serious concern. Services that can aggregate activity streams -- things that command a lot of our attention -- and make sorting through all that information easier are welcome. FriendFeed has the potential to be a very useful service in this area, but it needs a few tweaks, in my opinion.

First, it needs filters. As Fred Oliveira wrote, "If I already have Twitteriffic on, It makes sense to be able to filter out all Twitter bits from my friendfeed. If I’m in the mood for checking out photos from friends, I may want to see only photos on my friendfeed. If I’m looking for what my friends have been listening to on Last.fm, I might want to see only that."

Search was a good first step, but service and keyword based filters that give users more granular control over what sort of information is shown on their friends feed are a necessary next step. Filters could perhaps even be implemented on a friend-by-friend basis, and maybe automatic and weighted based on reading habits -- similar to Facebook's News Feed.

Filters would help us to actually reduce the amount of information we're tracking and remove noise from our feeds.

Second, FriendFeed needs to be a read/write service. Not in the way it is now, but by letting users write to the services they're pulling from. If I want to reply to a tweet, I don't want to do it on FriendFeed, I want to do it at the source: Twitter. Allowing me to do so from within FriendFeed would be awesome.

Third, FriendFeed needs an API (supposedly this is coming). While you shouldn't let your customers run your app, you should let your users define your application. Allowing developers to build on top of and extend the functionality of your application via mashups is often how good applications become killer applications. Without the ecosystem of awesome Twitter applications, for example, the service might not be nearly as fun to use and useful.

Conclusion

It is no wonder that FriendFeed has become the early breakout app of 2008. It has the potential to be truly useful, but right now it is doing more to highlight the problem of information overload -- and even add to it -- than it is to solve the problem. However, the promise of an application that can help us crawl out from under the constant stream of information that has inundated our lives is what makes FriendFeed, and similar services, so intriguing.

What do you think? Is FriendFeed a killer app as-is? Has it already helped your to cope with info overload? Let us know in the comments below, and be sure to vote in our poll.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/friendfeed_information_overload.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/friendfeed_information_overload.php Trends Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:16:55 -0800 Josh Catone Backlash is probably too harsh a word, but as the buzz around lifestreaming continues to build, some people are starting to question where it fits into their daily lives. Last week, we wondered whether sites like FriendFeed solved the problem of information overload, or merely brought attention to it. Keeping track of all that activity is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix, and this week, others are starting to feel the same way.
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]]> Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman asks how the feed concept will scale. "I love the concept of the News Feed. I think it is an early implementation of the Implict Web, helping to break down the data silos. However, I'm now receiving hundreds of feed updates a day. And with the combination of (1) more users activating feeds and (2) more web sites offering them, I think that feed volume is poised to increase exponentially. And I can sense that ... the volume will increase to a level that will require 24 hour vigilence to remain informed," he writes.

Fellow venture capitalist Brad Feld voices similar concerns, in a post entitled, "I Need A News Feed For My News Feeds." The solution for each of them lies in the creation of some sort of universal feed dashboard that manages your social activity feeds and determines which items require action and which are of interest.

For consultant Jevon MacDonald, who thinks that lifestream aggregators are starting to become "noise aggregators," the solution to the problem lies in the development of filters that learn what you want to read. "If I give someone's del.icio.us bookmarks a thumbs down every time I see it, then you should stop showing it to me. If I give a thumbs down on ever single del.icio.us bookmark I see, then make sure you never show me one again," he writes.



Interestingly enough, it was Facebook that really pushed this whole activity stream idea into the limelight in the first place, and it is Facebook who seems to be taking an early lead in developing tools to filter them. The Facebook News Feed is already filtered algorithmically, and Facebook offers a couple of tools to help users tailor the filters to their interests (including the thumbs up/down method that MacDonald espouses).

According to Marshall Kirkpatrick, the concept of the News Feed has been a more important contribution to the social media space by Facebook than their vaunted platform. It could be that Facebook will also take the lead in tackling how to cope with the information overload that has resulted from the numerous activity streams we're now tracking on various social services.

To be fair, lifestreaming and lifestream aggregation is in its infancy. The Facebook News Feed only appeared about a year an a half ago, Twitter only gained real attention about a year ago, and FriendFeed and similar services are even newer. However, dealing with information overload is clearly a problem that these services will need to figure out how to address -- whichever does it best will likely be a big winner.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_lifestreaming_backlash.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_lifestreaming_backlash.php Trends Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:57:36 -0800 Josh Catone The Canadian company AideRSS produces one of my favorite tools on the market right now. Their RSS feed filtering service is very useful in all kinds of circumstances. You can enter any RSS feed and it will score each item in the feed by number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, Diggs and inbound links it's received. You can then get a new feed of just the most popular items from your original feed.
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The company announced today that it's closed a round of funding from Waterloo, Ontario early stage investors Tech Capital Partners and a collection of Canadian Angel investors.

The basic functionality of AideRSS is remarkably simple but powerfully useful. It's the kind of thing everyone I talk to about it says "wow, that's cool and useful looking." Getting a little money in the bank should help AideRSS make its product more robust as well. To be honest, I have experienced frustrating performance issues since I discovered this service - but its functionality has been so compelling and unique that I find myself coming back to it regularly anyway.

ReadWriteWeb first covered AideRSS prelaunch in July, when Josh Catone gave it an in-depth review.

Information Overload

The company is positioning themselves as a solution to the growing problem of information overload. That's a big statement and implementation of that idea can take many forms.

I used AideRSS, for example, in building the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008. In that post I made available a collection of the top RSS feeds in each of five fields I believe are going to be hot in 2008 (Data Portability, Semantic Web, Mobile, etc). Each of those topics ended up having quite a lot of feeds in them and for the sake of efficiency there was no better way to offer our readers a feed of just the most popular items in these top feeds than to use AideRSS. I spliced each topic's feeds into one feed, ran than feed through AideRSS and then ran the AideRSS feed through FeedBurner - but you don't have to do anything nearly so complicated to use this very useful service. You can do a lot of very cool things with AideRSS, though. Try putting in del.icio.us feeds and search feeds, for example.

A simpler example is this. You might feel overwhelmed with the number of posts that ReadWriteWeb makes each day and want a feed of just the most popular items. You can visit or subscribe to this URL to do that: http://www.aiderss.com/best/readwriteweb.com

Limitations of AideRSS

There's lots of different ways to try and determine what the best items in feed are. AideRSS uses explicit Attention Gestures on 3rd party networks to track global popularity. Just because things are popular doesn't mean they are good, though, nor does it guarantee that they are the right items for you to read.

AideRSS is clearly taking a different approach than other systems based on your personal Attention Data, like FeedHub (our coverage) and some of the Newsgator products that rank news according to your reading habits. Other apps can filter news according to what's hot among a particular group of users you belong to (Attensa in the enterprise and to some degree Google Reader).

Everyone wants to tackle these issues and AideRSS has a particular approach to doing so.

Reaching Out

AideRSS has a freely available, public API that other apps can leverage internally as well. The showcase example so far is the super-search tool Lijit, which uses the AideRSS API in addition to various other cool tricks it can do.

This little Canadian company could have a bright future ahead of it. It does a great job of serving both a core need for all users and satisfying the need for magic that RSS power users have. Check it out, it's worth at the very least a few minutes of your time. You might find yourself coming back to it regularly like I have.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/aiderss_funding.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/aiderss_funding.php Products Wed, 09 Jan 2008 08:08:31 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick How do you create filters for the real-time web? From spam filtration to relevant discovery, the "filter geeks" at the Real-Time Web Summit today are all about creating simple, rich user experiences.

Hashtags for Twitter are a great start, but how are the startups moving and shaking the real-time web planning on giving users filters to control their streams in ways that make the ever-increasing volumes of information more usable? From Thing Labs and Twingly to PostRank and SocialText, read on for the problems these companies and their users have encountered and how they plan to solve information overload through clever curation and cooperation.

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]]> The session was led by Twingly CEO Martin Kallstrom, who opened with a discussion about hashtags. But one of the best things about both the unconference format and the intellectual cachet of Silicon Valley is illustrated by what happened next.

Thing Labs' CEO, Jason Shellen, interrupted to insist that we broaden the discussion to include the entire real-time web and all possible examples of filtration systems, not just Twitter and not just hashtags. From there, the conversation exploded into an executive-level goulash of how to make the real-time web useful.

The overall poverty of the user experience was generally deplored. "We hear from our users about what they want," said Shellen. "People say, 'Just show me the important stuff.'" The current state of real-time UXes allows for a lot of opportunity - the opportunity to make this iteration of the Internet simple for new users as well as appropriately complex for powerusers, unlike what we've all seen with RSS, which remains an underused geekcore feature.

The spectrum of data and metadata was brought up several times, as well. Keywords (e.g., hashtags) are a good start, but richer metadata would allow for filtration by sentiment or location. For example, a user might want to see blog posts about Obama's winning the Nobel Peace prize from right-leaning sources only. Or I might want to see pictures posted by people within 100 feet of me while I'm at the Real-Time Web Summit.

Overall, having the author, location, time, sentiment, and keywords automatically applied to user-generated data could lead to much richer streams with built-in filtering opportunities, both filtering content out as well as discovering new content and sources.

Another major point of emphasis for this session was the fact that a critical mass of users generally leads to the best filtering: Large datasets create very specifically defined problems and finely tuned filtration. Unfortunately, the startups involved in the real-time web often have smaller user bases than would be desired; there is simply not enough data generated by the users of the individual services. But what if all that user data was combined somehow?

"Right now," said Kallstrom, "people doing startups trying to combat information overload are mostly focused on finding high-quality signals. It's a very hard problem. The highest quality for the end user is achieved by moving from competing on gathering the signals to creating a great user experience through more open data."

One participant suggested publishing user activity to open-source the problem of how to filter real-time data. Many other participants agreed that the problem requires collaboration, data portability, and open standards between all the companies in the room and beyond. Such collaboration would make all real-time products better and lead to better experiences for users.

Then again, better filtration could be a real-time holy grail, a solution worth selling. And when the question of money comes up, will these startups be willing to sacrifice a theoretical goldmine to collaborate on a user-friendly solution?

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/filter_geeks_try_to_solve_info_overload_at_the_rea.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/filter_geeks_try_to_solve_info_overload_at_the_rea.php Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:34:05 -0800 Jolie O'Dell ReadWriteWeb is a partner with Defrag, a conference about web innovation. Defrag's Eric Norlin has lately been blogging about enterprises and organizations starting to move beyond mere 'cost containment' (although that's still a big driver) and into using web technologies to boost productivity. Eric points out that "taming the data" is one of the challenges of this shift, because there is so much information online which workers need to process. And it's not just taming the data, but gleaning 'intelligence' from it. He mentions a number of buzzwords: enterprise 2.0, semantic web, business intelligence. Eric's main point is that this space is wide open for innovation - going beyond Webex, social networks and so on.

Part of the problem in the enterprise/business market is the predominance of big, bulky software from large IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Oracle. Although most of those companies are slowly evolving into offering web-based software (Cisco owns Webex for example), it tends to be slow progress from all the bigcos except for Google. But nowadays we're seeing startups making a significant impact in the enterprise. There are two main ways this is happening...

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]]> One is through integration. For example this week Atlassian announced Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in the latest release of their enterprise wiki solution Confluence. As we reported, this means that users no longer need to know the technicalities of using wikis (which has long been a factor in wikis not being adopted en masse in the enterprise), Confluence users can now use Microsoft Word. This will clearly boost productivity and usage of wikis, which in turn makes knowledge management easier to manage in organzations.



The other way startups are adding innovation to the enterprise is through new types of products that are tackling problems such as information overload. An example that we've been wanting to mention for a while now is Cognition Technologies, which is licensing its semantic web technologies to various organizations. Cognition's Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology is being used for a number of different applications, from health to law. While not so much enterprise at this time, it's easy to see how Cognition's technology could be used to filter information where ever there is a large data set - which is many businesses these days.


Graphic from Cognition's website

What other startups and products have you noticed lately that are tackling the 'info overload' problem - and so boosting productivity - in organizations?

Defrag is being held November 3-4 in Denver, Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $100 off of the early bird price, which ends this Friday.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_web_technology_is_boosting_productivity_in_organizations.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_web_technology_is_boosting_productivity_in_organizations.php Analysis Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:00:00 -0800 Richard MacManus Technology, broadly, is a tool or set of tools aimed at making some aspect of life better, easier, or more efficient. On the web, that could mean scripting languages that make it easier for developers to create applications, or it could mean applications that make it easier for us to accomplish a task. Let's not debate the definition of the word technology, but rather, is web technology working for you? Are so-called web 2.0 applications making your life easier or overloading you with too much information?
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]]> "It is no secret that we live in an information overload age," is how Alex Iskold began his must-read Attention Economy overview that was published on ReadWriteWeb about one year ago. We're constantly bombarded with information these days -- news, blogs, photos, videos, Twitter, emails, text messages, phone calls, etc. All of these things are vying for and tugging at our attention.

So the question becomes: is the technology that is supposed to make our lives easier, actually overwhelming us and making our lives more difficult? And if so, how do we escape the negative effect of technology overload?

The latest in the compelling series of Oxford 2.0 debates over at the Economist web site (which we covered in December) deals with the proposition: If the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing.

Arguing on the pro side (that technology is complicating our lives) is Richard Szafranski, Partner, Toffler Associates. On the con side (that technology is simplifying our lives) is John Maeda, President Elect of the Rhode Island School of Design. The debate runs until March 6 and spectators are right now split 64%-34% in favor of the con side.

The Economist debate is speaking broadly to technology as a whole (which might include everything from the hammer and nail to the Large Hadron Collider), but the relevance to our problem of information overload is undeniable.

From Szafranski's opening statement:

"We--hundreds of millions of us and growing--embrace the very technologies that make our lives and our relationships more difficult and fill many of our waking moments with activity. We love--to the point of gluttony--to communicate, play, invent, learn, imagine and acquire. Information technology has given us tools to do all of those anywhere and round the clock. We are awash in the benefits that high-bandwidth fixed and mobile wireless communications, email, text messages, pictures, games, data and information give us, including instant access to thousands of products. The seductive ease with which we can engage in any and all of those activities, or quests or endeavours makes it difficult and stressful to not be overwhelmed by choices. Choosing takes time and our time is not unlimited. Devices and applications that save us labour in one area may merely allow us, and sometimes seem to compel us, to invest labour in other areas.

We say or hear, "I must do my email tonight, or by tomorrow I’ll have over 600 to read." We want to buy a pot. Search on "pottery" and get 254,000,000 results. We want to find the John Li we met at a conference. Search on "John Li" and get 8,600,000 results. Do I do email, narrow the searches, eat dinner, pick up my laundry or call a friend? Because technology has spawned numerous complex variations I must repeatedly go through the act of evaluating and choosing -- a labour of deciding. Technology has imposed the encumbrance of over-choice on us."

And from Maeda's first parry:

"Recognize simplicity as being about two goals realized simultaneously: the saving of time to realize efficiencies, and later wasting the time that you have gained on some humanly pursuit. Thus true simplicity in life is one part technology, and the other part away from technology.

We voluntarily let technology enter our lives in the infantile state that it currently exists, and the challenge is to wait for it to mature to something we can all be proud of. Patience is a virtue I am told, and I await the many improvements that lie ahead. To say that technology is failing to simplify our lives misses the point that in the past decade we have lived in an era of breakneck innovation. This pace is fortunately slowing and industries are retrenching so that design-led approaches can take command to give root to more meaningful technology experiences."

Szafranski is arguing that the benefit of technology has been overwhelmed by the sheer complexity and enormity of it. Technology may have solved some problems, but it has created others that are just as negative, or perhaps worse. Or, for example, Google gives us access to so much information that finding what we're looking for is such a complex task that our lives are worse off for it. On the other hand, Maeda's argument is that information technology is so new that we're only now beginning to refine it in ways that make it more simple. It can be a tad overwhelming when a Google search return 4 million results, but give it a few years and it is bound to get better.

This is an intensely interesting debate, and we thought it would be fun to try to continue it here with a focus on web technologies. Is the information overload that we're all acutely experiencing worth the utility we're getting out of it? Has technology on the web failed us or has it made our lives easier? What do you think? The floor is open for debate, let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Image via a Geico ad.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_web_technology_making_your_life_better.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_web_technology_making_your_life_better.php Trends Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:15:08 -0800 Josh Catone At first glance, it seems like SkyData is trying to do too much. This mobile app mashes up data from your email contacts, your social network contacts, your business contacts, as well as business data from CRM applications like Salesforce.com, location-based info from sites like Yelp, travel info, news and RSS feeds, and even Google Maps. Is this a case of info overload or is this an app every business user will want to have?
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]]> About SkyData

The SkyData application is designed specifically for smartphones, as its target demographic is the traveling business user, not the consumer. At the moment, the app works on Windows Mobile and Blackberry, but an iPhone version will be ready by year-end, they say. At DEMO, the app was shown on Windows Mobile, but they did give a quick peek at both the Blackberry app and iPhone version, too.

The idea with SkyData is that you now have one screen from which you can easily access all the data and info you need. But it's more than just ease-of-access that makes SkyData interesting - it also integrates with your phone, too. For example, you can add your LinkedIn contacts to your phone's contacts from the app's menu.

Social Network Integration

From the SkyData application, you can dive into your contacts, no matter where you have them stored. You can access email contacts like those you have in Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo Mail, but you can also access social network contacts like those on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, or Jigsaw.

CRM Integration

At the moment, SkyData integrates with Salesforce.com, but NetSuite and SugarCRM will be coming soon. They will then be followed by Microsoft and Siebel. What's unique about SkyData is, again, the app/phone integration. As you view emails, calls, and text messages, you can access all the info stored in SkyData with only a couple of clicks from within those messages. That adds a new layer of contextual information to the day-to-day communications that you recieve on your mobile device.

Pricing

The SkyData Personal Edition is free to use and combines social networks, Facebook, and related news. The Business Edition offers the CRM integration for $9.95 per month. Both editions are in private beta.

Too Much?

The scenario envisioned for using SkyData involves a traveling business person, such as someone who does sales, preparing for a meeting with a client. From this one app, they can quickly get a refresher on all the relevant information they have access to about that person, the company, and the market in general. They can even find a nearby restaurant where they can wine and dine them later after the meeting has concluded.

However, with the vast number of services and networks supported, it's possible that instead of being a convenient one-stop-shop, it's mashup overload.

Would you want all your networks mashed into one and available on your smartphone? Or would that be too confusing? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/skydata_integrates_everything_puts_it_on_smartphone.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/skydata_integrates_everything_puts_it_on_smartphone.php Products Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez