Notes from Supernova: Personal Infosphere

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This panel's all about how we can keep up of all the information that comes in every day. We're

Dalton from imeem

  • We're reaching some limit as to the amount of information we can handle.
  • imeem creates both an IM client and web client
  • Instant messaging is useful as a communications tool, but about presence. Presence is actually the most important part of IM clients.
  • They've got real-time notification of new blog posts, profile updates, etc.
  • They have groups to "aggregate people around particular topics"
  • Trying to manage all forms of digital information, can pull in data from other services
  • They have a unified tag space across media types (eeenteresting). I wonder how that plays out with users. People tag different content differently, do users of imeem use consistent tags across media?

Yael from eSnips

  • They have mainstream users, not teens.
  • Social, but focused on content, not people
  • It's for sharing interest and passions but lets you go one step further

Ben from Plaxo

  • 5 year-old company

  • Synchronized address book

  • People have on average:

    • 3-4 phone numbers
    • 2-3 e-mail addresses
    • 2-3 physical addresses

  • And this information is always changing

  • 33% of mobile phone numbers and 24% of e-mail addresses change annually

Tariq Krim from Netvibes

  • Create a single place for your entire digital life. Another personal portal.
  • They have an open API for module developers.
  • They have a public wiki for users to request features and report bugs
  • They have a really cool live translating tool
  • So they want to use "open standards", but didn't really say which ones

Hans from Plum

  • Connect with each others "heads", not with dates.
  • Collect data of all types and drop it into buckets
  • "Communities of Knowledge"
  • Tiny little application that runs and allows you to add anything you read into a collection.
  • Wow... this is really cool. Collect anything from your desktop and throw it up into a collection. Neato.
  • Everything is indexed and searchable.
  • Works great on the Mac too. Yay!!
  • Also allows you to connect to people with similar collections to yours.
  • They dig microformats as well.
  • They use Amazon's S3 for the data.

Discussion

  • Collaborative Filtering

    • imeem uses collaborative filtering to decide how popular or "good" something is. Compared to PageRank
    • Plum called on "big" companies like Yahoo and AOL to come up with a good scheme for licensing documents or declaring document license. Time to go read up on rel license, isn't it?

  • Lot of talk of ownership while avoiding completely the topic of lock-in and open API's. Oh well, we'll talk about it in the next panel.