There is little doubt web evolution is moving in the direction of relevance. Take Google Search that now mines the entire social web in real-time via Caffeine - it hasn't improved relevancy so hasn't stopped people increasingly question the quality of Google's search results. More data is generated than can be possibly consumed, even opted-in data. All your feeds - between your email, Facebook, Twitter, RSS aggregator, favourite websites and information you need but haven't even found yet (probably because of data noise) - can you say you consume what is most relevant?
Of course the industry is catching up: APIs, widgets, streams and feeds are common parlance in 2011. Summify is a decent attempt at injecting relevance into all your data feeds. However, I think its solution is the wrong one. What must work best is a service that aggregates everything - that pings your bookmarks for updates, that knows your favourite hashtags and search history, that taps all your social feeds. An email summary once-a-day with 10 items is going to miss information you need. In fact, Summify has never asked me how to rate my own data, how to influence what it deems relevant - it's far too random. An information stream of everything -timelined chronologically- won't. Similar to Gmails "Important"/"Not important" meta-labels, we need something that can learn over time, so you can elevate importance of certain data, so that certain friends, hashtags, keywords grow in importance and literally steal the screen when presented alongside the parent feed. A non-linear timeline feed where what's most important literally jumps out. Nothing is missed - you still see everything and if you disagree you mark up/down depending on how relevant the data in front of you is. A learning algorithm over time, that elevates items' relevances as you direct...
Of course the industry is catching up: APIs, widgets, streams and feeds are common parlance in 2011. Summify is a decent attempt at injecting relevance into all your data feeds. However, I think its solution is the wrong one. What must work best is a service that aggregates everything - that pings your bookmarks for updates, that knows your favourite hashtags and search history, that taps all your social feeds. An email summary once-a-day with 10 items is going to miss information you need. In fact, Summify has never asked me how to rate my own data, how to influence what it deems relevant - it's far too random. An information stream of everything -timelined chronologically- won't. Similar to Gmails "Important"/"Not important" meta-labels, we need something that can learn over time, so you can elevate importance of certain data, so that certain friends, hashtags, keywords grow in importance and literally steal the screen when presented alongside the parent feed. A non-linear timeline feed where what's most important literally jumps out. Nothing is missed - you still see everything and if you disagree you mark up/down depending on how relevant the data in front of you is. A learning algorithm over time, that elevates items' relevances as you direct...
So yesterday, Summify sent me my digest 1 hour late, 1 story short, and 1 item was in Arabic... Again relevance is about tailoring data to match a profile - most people would be willing to give up information about themselves to get something relevant (Amazon, Facebook, Google all do it, targeted ads/offers etc)
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