Helping You Filter Streams - Darwin Awareness Engine

I've promised Bill Ives that I'd write a blogpost about Darwin Awareness Engine a long time ago. Finally, here's my post about this new and interesting service. Sorry it took so long...

How do you keep up with the news, tweets, updates and feeds? We live in the wonderful world of information abundance. But many feel overwhelmed by the amount and speed of information. Some even talk about information overload.

I described how I keep up with what's going on in the world and in my area's of interest. But can't it be better?
Yes, it can. This is where all kinds of new(er) solutions pop up. Like Techmeme and Postrank. There's even talk of Web Squared, Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web, which should help us filter through loads of information coming at us. Not just by highlighting 'the best tweets and feeds', but my semantically analyzing and summarizing the information.

The Darwin Awareness Engine fits in this movement. And I think they're doing a good job. I can see why they won several prizes. It works and it's useful.

Bill Ives explains what Darwin Engine is about and what it does here.

Rather than using semantic technology to attempt to enable understanding by a computer, our approach to awareness based on Chaos Theory provides a visualization of results that better enables a person to make more informed decisions about where to look next. Then there are tools that allow for efficient drilling down into relevant details. It builds on a person’s expertise rather than trying to replace it.

You can try it here or built on Twitter here. You'll see it presents the information in tagcloud-like visualizations. It also shows a ticker-tape. By adding and removing terms (attractors) the results can be manipulated.

I used Darwin Engine for some time. I don't use it very often anymore. My experiences are:

• Darwin Engine or Twortex was an extra space for me to watch (besides the streams that I already pay attention to). It was too much for me to also keep going there. I also wonder if this has to do with usability. Are the visualizations visual enough and is the interface self-explanatory enough for users to keep coming back? The biggest challenge for a new service is to get users to integrate it in their workflow.
• I liked the application of the Engine to Twitter, called Twortex. It would be great to flip the standard Twitter timeline with a more visual one like Twortex. Not only on terms but also on my or one of my follower's timeline. I do find Twortex kind of slow. Sometimes is keeps on processing without showing results.
• Related to the previous bullet: I think it would be helpful to have a more visual navigation of my feeds in Google Reader. I'd like to see the traditional feedlist and easily flip to the visual mode. Flipboard and Zite show there a market for more visual navigation.
• As mentioned on the website, Darwin Engine is great for business and competitive intelligence work. And for information management departments. It would be neat to use the Engine on internal company information as well.

I'm curious where Darwin Engine is headed. I hope my remarks are useful to the creators and users  of the Engine.
Have you used Darwin Engine? What are your experiences? Please share your comments or blogposts here.

Foursquare Useless (for now)

Location-based services are very interesting, I find. And I see a big future for them. The fact that you can connect content to a location is intriguing. It's even more fascinating to realize that it's not just content linked to a location, but also the person sharing the content is linked to it.

I've been using Foursquare since the beginning, checking in regularly (now 1379 checkins). I changed my location sharing strategies several times: from sharing everything on Twitter to sharing nothing and everything in between. Looking at the numbers location-based services are growing, but they're still a niche. It's great to see businesses experimenting with these services. Starting now will give them an edge when things go mainstream.

But has it been useful to me? Has it made me more productive? Have I met more interesting people? Did I get interesting discounts? In short: No, it didn't. Let me explain.

• It's great to get badges every now-and-then, to see where others are hanging out (although I hardly check the checkin feed, only when it pops up on Twitter). Getting a badge is fun and encouraging. But it's not enough to make a service useful to me. The same goes for the leaderboard.
• Checking in to (unknown) places is fun as well. It feels like discovering something new. Checking in to the same place over-and-over is no fun. It would be better if that was automated.
• The push notifications are kind of useful. It gives you some ambient awareness where your 'friends' are. Only once I met up with someone based on their Foursquare checkin. In another case my checkin led to a meeting later on during that day. ('Hey, you're in Amsterdam, shall we meet?') Wouldn't it be more useful to also be able to share where you plan to be during the day, making friend encounters more probable? Like TripIt or Forecast.
• Not very many people use Foursquare. At least not in Holland and the places that I visit. (Some say there are 150.000 users in Holland. Others say 175.000 or just 20.000.) So, I found myself following people that I don't even know just to increase the likelihood I'd meet someone somewhere.

This doesn't imply Foursquare is useless in general. As I said, it has huge potential and some companies are successfully using  these services to promote their brand, services and products. We have all heard of the 'free coffee for mayors' and 'get a book for free after 10 checkins' offers. (I collected some examples here and here.) I just don't think it's useful now. This is clearly only the start. And I think that's the problem for these services as well. We've just started to understand what social media means for our lives and for business. Location-based services is a next wave to understand. It's just to early. At least in Holland it is.

So, what are your experiences with location-based services? Are they helpful? What sharing strategies do you apply? And is my perspective biased by the fact that I live in Holland? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

In the meantime, I'll keep using Foursquare, hoping for better times!

A Brief History of the Corporation

There are lots of good bloggers and blogposts out there. But every now and then I run into a post that is just great. This is one of them: A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 by Venkatesh Rao. It's a long post! So, make sure you have some time to read and process it.

Why do I think this post is so interesting? Well, there's been lots of debate about what social media means for traditional business. Will it change or is it changing the way we do business? Is the traditional, hierarchical way of organizing companies sustainable? Is social media correcting the industrial revolution? Or should we say 'the industrial interruption', like 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' says. Is this enterprise 2.0 or social business?

Much has been and is being written about this topic. Just think of the books 'Wikinomics', 'Macrowikinomics' and 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' itself.

So, what is this post about. In it's own words:

The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.

And it goes on to provide proof or leads for this statement pointing to fundamental forces creating this shift in the world.

One of the things that also struck me was the way Rao writes about technology. As if it's an autonomous force. It's the same way of talking about technology that I'm reading about in 'What Technology Wants' by Kevin Kelly. (Note: You should check the interesting discussion between Carr and Kelly here.) Roa says about technology (and business):

It is technology, acting through business and Schumpeterian creative-destruction, that drives monotonic, historicist change, for good or bad. Business is the locus where the non-human force of technological change sneaks into the human sphere.

But what's the point of this all? Growth has changed over the years. And growth has never been limitless. In our time there may be an unlimited amount of ideas, but attention is not limitless. This has implications for business. 

The equation was simple: energy and ideas turned into products and services could be used to buy time. Specifically, energy and ideas could be used to shrink autonomously-owned individual time and grow a space of corporate-owned time, to be divided between production and consumption. Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-savingdevices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain.
Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle, but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. There is only one Earth worth of space to colonize. Only one fossil-fuel store of energy to dig out. Only 24 hours per person per day to turn into capitive attention.
Among the people who got it wrong was my favorite visionary, Vannevar Bush, who talked of science: the endless frontier. To believe that there is an arguably limitless supply of valuable ideas waiting to be discovered is one thing. To argue that they constitute a limitless reserve of value for Schumpeterian growth to deliver is to misunderstand how ideas work: they are only valuable if attention is efficiently directed to the right places to discover them and energy is used to turn them into businesses, and Arthur-Clarke magic.

HT Andy McAfee for pointing to this post!http://info-architecture.blogspot.com/2011/07/brief-history-of-corporation.html