Unfolding the Web

Lifestreaming aggregators became popular as the number of different applications where you could participate — either by updating your status or by uploading something — increased. The aggregators are here to relieve you from the burden of going to multiple locations to find out what your friends or contacts are up to.

Services like plaxo, spokeo, friendfeed or socialthing (lifestream blog has a more compreheensible list) start by asking your identification on different services. Then they aggregate information you update on those services and let you — and your contacts — access that information from a central location.

This obviously means that the aggregators wouldn’t exist if the services they’re collecting information from weren’t popular. Those lifestreaming services opened the way to this new wave of applications. So, what is lifestreaming, anyway?

Lifestreaming itself is the ability to publish quick updates about what you’re doing or thinking at the moment. Those posts can be very short and textual, or they can contain other media such as pictures, or video. There is a considerable number of available lifestreaming services, with twitter being the most popular.

Some people are questioning the true value of these lifestreaming services. Major concerns are a) the increasing volume of information you’ll have to process; and b) the decreasing willingness to participate by writing more extensive thoughts.

Some evidence of these concerns can be found at the Micro Persuasion blog, where Steve Rubel explains that:

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.

This is also affecting blogging, as Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb, believes:

When people post an article on a blog these days, the conversations are occurring offsite. The blog link could be submitted to Digg, Mixx, and/or FriendFeed, and conversations may occur around the topic on those sites instead. The original blog post, meanwhile, has 0 comments.

So, how can lifestreaming and its aggregators be a good thing if they’re disrupting the way you’re used to interact on the Web? I believe we’re in the beginning of a much wider paradigm shift where the interaction will move from localized items — like blog posts — and start spreading all across the Web. What will matter in the future is not the place where you posted your thought or your comment but instead its context.

How will it evolve? Probably microformats will play an important role, as they allow you to refer to disperse pieces of information and define the context of the information you’re publishing. Aggregators and search engines will also play an important role, clustering information according to their context.

tagged as aggregators, friendfeed, lifestream, lifestreaming, plaxo, spokeo, twitter

Are you tired of your feed reader? Do you wish you could find more interesting posts, or perhaps new blogs related to your current tastes and preferences?

Apparently Dave Winer feels the same way:

I want rating services to provide clues about what I should be subscribing to. I want them to find not what’s popular with the masses but what will be valuable to me.

He then touches the sweet spot:

It’s a simple matter to apply collaborative filtering to this problem, we’ve even done it in SYO. These ideas need revisiting now that everyone else seems to have caught on that this is a problem worth solving.

Paolo Avesani, who’s already been studying this subject for some time, understands that tags alone are not enough to propose recommendations. Quoting the paper “An Analysis of the Use of Tags in a Blog Recommender System” [Hayes et al., 2007] (PDF):

In the blog domain, however, we find that tags are rather poor at partitioning blog data. Using content-based clustering, we observe that a small proportion of users in every cluster have independently used the same tag tokens to describe his/her posts.

We definitely need something new. What about using collaborative filtering algorithms to gain knowledge about the users’ tastes and eventually recommend them interesting content? The Pearson correlation algorithm is probably a good candidate.

I suggest watching Tayfun Şen’s excellent presentation about collaborative filtering.

tagged as blogs, collaborative filtering, pearson, recommendation, web 2.0

Do you know Netvibes? What about Eskobo, Pageflakes, Protopage, Schmedley and Webwag, to name just a few?

Netvibes calls itself the pioneer of the personalized startpage. Quoting their about page: “Netvibes pioneered the personalized startpage, an alternative to traditional Web portals“.

Well, dit it? Let’s travel back to 1999 when there was no such thing as AJAX or RoR, and Mike Arrington was just leaving the comfort of his office at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to dedicate his time to the “brand new Web”.

Sometime between the launch of Napster (May 1999) and the launch of pitas.com, the free weblog hosting (July 1999), someone in the UK launched “a one-day hack” which provides a nice, concise view of news from several sites (in LWN, July 1, 1999). Better than that, he published the source code of his creation, allowing anyone to use it and change it. Quoting freshmeat’s project entry from August 8, 1999:

Portaloo is a set of reading tools for RSS format files (my.netscape.com, etc.) and rendering these. It can cope with arbitary input formats and also includes gathering tools for other sites. Portaloo needs no writeable disk storage, uses cookies for control and can run round robin across multiple web servers under load.

Of course this is a very technical description to what we now call a personalized startpage. Portaloo was, at that time the free, open source version of the then popular My Netscape. Netscape launched its personalized startpage at the end of 1998 and it allowed the visitor to add and remove boxes or channels. You could search the Web, access your e-mail messages, and even chat with your friends via IM.

What happened since then? A lot, actually. First, the bubble, leaving only the big players intact. Then, a new generation of Web adventurers started to emerge, experimenting with new technologies and ideas.

So, what have you been doing all these years?

tagged as ajax, netscape, netvibes, pageflakes, portaloo, protopage, startpage, web portals