all hail the shag

Its been a busy few weeks for us in the office at Filtrbox. We just put out a new release with some big improvements we’ve had in the works for awhile. Between defrag, a board meeting, the boulder.me job fair, and the new version – the lights have been on late at the new digs. Even the dog is doing code reviews…

The Filtrbox team is pretty excited about the new release for a lot of reasons, but the biggest thing is the new search functionality. Previously, we had a pseudo-realtime search mechanism that went off and ran a one-time data collector when you added a Filtr. If content was found quickly you’d see new articles in the dashboard, but in many cases if the search took awhile or timed out due to slow sites, and you wouldn’t get immediate results. The lack of instant feedback on your new Filtrs was a big frustration of ours. In this new release its totally different and the system runs a realtime search, hitting our mainstream news index, blog index, and twitter (if you have social media enabled). It takes a few seconds but returns the same articles you’ll get with the ongoing persistent search.

Personally I’m also glad to have the “delete article” feature in the new release because its something I like to use to get rid of articles I never want to see again. Feedback has been good so far – check out the “filtrbox love on twitter”…love to hear from you too! 

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I’m at the Defrag conference today with lots of other folks who care about “accelerating the ah-ha moment!”, according to the conference. Really, this conference is all about putting meaning and context around the insane amount of information available online. What I care about, even more, is how we find the RIGHT information in a timely and painless manner and deliver that in a way that is effective.

I just saw a screenshot-demo for a product called Sxipper, the current version holds your passwords but I already use 1Password for that. The new version brings a vast amount of meta-info to the browsing experience – this is being called a “flow app” and I think it has promise (think “adaptive blue” for social info).

As I listen to the discussions, there is an underlying conversation around doing better filtering, separating information, dealing with information overload, and finding the value in all the info. Of course this all is very much related to Filtrbox’s mission and is why I’m here.  There is much we can (and should) do at Filtrbox to deliver valuable meta-information around the content we discover. Presenting the right meta-info without just amplifying the noise problem is something we are focused on. It will be interesting to see if “flow apps” like Me.dium or Sxipper can figure out how to do this in a more streamlined manner. I don’t think sidebars/sidecar browser apps are it. For me these are too distracting and make the problem worse, even though the info they provide is helpful.

What is clear to me is that as smart as we humans can be, and no matter how good and intelligent we try to make the filters and the software, there is, and will be a NEVER-ENDING quest for the better, smarter filter.

Although humans can be predictable, the brain is not a binary system, and predicting what we care about or don’t care about at a given moment is non-trivial. When the information and its profile is contstantly changing, and the attention, interest and focus of the mind is changing – finding those patterns programattically is a “holy-grail” mission. Lets see how far we can get…

filtrbox, info overload, startups "information overload", defrag08, filtrbox, me.dium, sxipper