Got overload? APML offspring to hit the floor!
I have RSS overload, I have plenty of favourite Web 2.0 applications (in fact I have more of them than Amelda Marcos had unworn pairs of shoes) I have a Mom (huh?), I have two of my own community sites: http://www.dolcevia.com and http://www.thewestconnection.com besides several others I just belong too and yes I basically have quite a few competitors. If you are wondering where I am going, it may be a good idea to check out Particls.com right now alternatively save time and read on.
Particls was delivered to us by TouchstoneLive and it is like the mama of all widgets, the filter allmighty. What Particls does is pretty easy to explain to just about anyone and that is in itself really beautiful. In fact it simply helps you track your favourites sites and applications by displaying desktop alerts for important changes. Not rocket science at first glance, I agree. However..
I first came into aqaintence with Touchstone whilst researching the true ideas and believers behind the Semantic Web and you cannot indeed help on passing, to bump into another bunch of strong believers: namely the APML people. These are the same who claim high stakes on the Attention Economy, the Semantics however believe we are going to be tagging our way to ultimate wisdom and riches. To explain with slight depth. APML people are focussed on turning the web around you, making it deliver its resources to you in a very personalized fashion, which is how it should be. They use terms such as Attention Profiling and Personal Relevancy, comparing information against your profile to measure its relevancy to you.
Generally I believe Semantics will lend you a pair of wellingtons and a flashlight and tell you to follow the Tags, more commonly known as yellow arrows.
Both parties are actually working from the same foundation: the Web is just getting too big for a normal sized brain to comprehend. If you take the universe as the metaphore for the WWW we are all still very much in the exploration phase. In fact most of us havnt even ventured beyond the moon and the further we go it just keeps on getting bigger. God is never going to give you that inifinit amount of time to follow all the sites, conversations and newsfeeds you believe you have a right too know about.
So here comes Particls, the first of the APML offspring, it allows you to subscribe to sites and feeds and get notified when they change but that doesnt even skim the surface of what it actually does. Particls is intelligent because it can work out how important that news is to you and displays that on a ‘porportional alert’.
From the Touchstone manifesto a very bold statement, which I think sounds pretty emcompassing, I imagine it is referring to Particls: “An Attention Management Engine is an engine that proposes to solve the latest Attention Deficit Problem by calculating the Personal Relevancy of content and using a set of presentation rules in order to manage and filter the flow of information into your consciousness.”
Back to basic English and to show some Touchstone examples of alerts :
“For example, general information can be displayed on a news ticker, important stuff might appear on a popup alert and urgent information could be SMS’d to your phone.”
I really like the idea and I have good faith in Touchstone that it will work. I recommend you try it out or at least watch the demo-casts. If you want to know how it works: http://www.particls.com/about/technology/
If you would like to try a beta, I think I should have a few invitations if its not available on the website: http://www.particls.com
