I’m usually not one for writing about myself but thought I’d share the link to the video interview I did recently with Entrepreneur.com about Filtrbox. Its short (about 2 minutes) and covers a lot of ground. Best of all we did it in one take!
If you can’t see the video, try this link
Dave Winer had it right when he said the internet is cyclical. We seem to be in an interesting cycle here where what’s old is new again. Two cases emerged for me today.
1) rssCloud – a 2002-era concept re-tooled for today as an alternate to the “company-owned” content pub/sub models (think Twitter). This is interesting, but I’m wondering what is going to happen around scalablity. I really like the idea; it allows publishers and consumers to get more real-time and its opt-in, and doesn’t require any retooling (maybe a plugin or a few SW updates). Wordpress just announced support for it on the WP.com platform. I just installed the plugin on this blog so I can push updates to an rssCloud too. No idea WTF I’m talking about? Read the primer here and here.
The whole intent, according to DW> “The idea is to deliver news faster, without relying on a single company to do all the work.” This is a good idea, and holds to the democratic intent of the free internet, but at the end of the day its going to be companies (ok, maybe not a single one) that will likely foot the bill for the cloud servers that power a large-scale rssCloud. DW has set up one up graciously, but he’s paying for it. Wordpress will run one but they’ve probably got a few hundred extra servers lying around at this point. Google may jump over from pubsubhubbub or whatever and put up an infinitely scalable rssCloud server. Once again, we have a content ecosystem dependent on one (or a few) companies. Its in these companies best interest to provide the server component, but then its not truly democratic as those who own the servers has the data and can, potentially, control the traffic (which was part of the problem rssCloud was looking to address).
Ironically, the reason this is old/new is that this is all coming on the heels of the “RSS is dead” meme that is running rampant currently. People, RSS is NOT dead, not by a long shot. RSS-based business models may be dead, but RSS was never really meant to be more than what its namesake describes it as – a content syndication protocol. It was not a market or a business onto itself (big props to Feedburner for proving otherwise!).
2) Toolbars – After noticing a nice toolbar on feld.com, I started poking around a bit and have now been made aware of at least two companies who have site/blog toolbars in beta. The one on feld.com is Wibya, and another is extendy. I’ve got the latter installed here for a week to test it out. I’ll run wibya also once I get an invite. Both of these are footer-based toolbars that provide some nice functionally and stay out of your way. Let me know what you think or of there are others out there. Customization will be key, but so will overall usability and elegance. No one wants to put an ugly toolbar they can’t modify onto their site.
At Filtrbox, we added an article-sharing toolbar (think diggbar or facebook sharing bar) a few months ago to better facilitate content sharing and I’m seeing more and more of these pop up. Why are they coming back? Well, thanks to Twitter, Facebook, link-shortening services, and the like there is more and more value in providing quick access to sharing good content. Plugins, sidebars, etc are getting more and more clunky, crowded and require more space. It will be interesting to see if this round of toolbars stick around. Browser-based ones are tough, but site-based ones may be a more elegant solution and more interesting from a business standpoint. (Why? It’s the data, stupid!)
Next thing you know, desktop apps will be coming back. Oh snap – they just did!
Tom Chikoore (Filtrbox co-founder) has written a great post titled “The Death of the Rocky Mountain News and the Rise of Filtrbox“. Its a good perspective on how content is king, and its the mediums and their models that are evolving.
Several weeks ago, while purchasing a commemorative copy of the Rocky Mountain News, I came to the realization that two distinct stories, symbolic of the shift in media landscape, were playing themselves out on both ends of US-36. In Denver, The Rocky Mountain News, a symbol of traditional mainstream media, was closing down after almost 150 years of publishing. In Boulder, at Filtrbox, a young new media company, we were celebrating the release of the latest version of our service, Filtrbox G2. While the people at the Rocky Mountain News were probably not aware of Filtrbox, I had a keen eye on the daily goings on at The Rocky and I looked at the whole situation at the Rocky as a symbolic passing of the media torch.
Read the entire post here, and let him know what you think about content vs. medium!
I’m heading to SXSW (south by southwest) today to check out the conference. It’s been blowing up the last few years, especially the Interactive conference. Getting there on the tail end of things, as I had a few too many demands on on the calendar. Yes, I’m a newbie. No, I won’t be drunk the while time.
Filtrbox is co-sponsoring the CO interactive party tonight, should be a god time. Http://Colorado-interactive.com
Things I’m looking forward to checking out @sxsw…
1. Is there real dialogue on topics or just polite agreement? (note: based on the apparently awesome #specwork09 panel I missed, the answer is yes on the realness)
2. Are people talking about the future of search? What are the other emerging trends (aside from filtering and semantic intelligence).
3. New/breakout apps launching -what’s got people interested and what flops? Apparently AT&T’s cell network blows in Austin, to the point where Wired has written about it and iPhone peeps are pissed! Might make it hard for mobility apps to get the adoption they need.
What are the don’t miss panels/parties/apps/topics? Let me know.
Almost every day it seems a new service or mashup for Twitter comes out. Some will stick, others won’t. That’s the great thing about the internet is that everyone gets to try! Twitter has reached a point of critical mass now where mining the data and the trends around what’s happening on Twitter is as valuable as the messages themselves. I use twitter for both business and personal pursuits, and have tried a ton of the apps and services that have come out. Here are my favorites;
Totally worth the 3 bucks. Here’s one of the menus…
There are a ton of others out there, but these are my faves and what I rely on. Let me know what I missed or what you like better!
When the #motrinmoms thing blew up recently I added the keyword as a Filtr to my Filtrbox account. After skimming the results for a few days and noticing the volume of conversations were dying down quickly wanted to see what that would look like visually. Here’s a graph for the last 15 days…
Net-Net: Don’t piss off mommy bloggers…ever. I wasn’t even tracking tweets with this account and there were 60 posts on this topic in a single day.
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!
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…
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Here I am again in front of the computer after midnight and I guess my bio clock has adjusted because it doesn’t even feel late to me anymore.
We’ve been cranking hard at Filtrbox every day and night for the last two weeks getting ourselves ready (reasonably) for VCIR and the launch of the new site (which is about an hour away!).
Big week for Filtrbox – our 4th hire, new site going up, VCIR pitch, and one more announcement I don’t want to spoil here…
We are having fun too – there is something about working your ass off and seeing the results each day. Reminds me of the JustOn days a bit…