Ultranormal

This panel’s all about how we can keep up of all the information that comes in every day. We’re
h4. Dalton from imeem
* We’re reaching some limit as to the amount of information we can handle.
* imeem creates both an IM client and web client
* Instant messaging is useful as a communications tool, but about presence. Presence is actually the most important part of IM clients.
* They’ve got real-time notification of new blog posts, profile updates, etc.
* They have groups to “aggregate people around particular topics”
* Trying to manage all forms of digital information, can pull in data from other services
* They have a unified tag space across media types (eeenteresting). I wonder how that plays out with users. People tag different content differently, do users of imeem use consistent tags across media?
h4. Yael from eSnips
* They have mainstream users, not teens.
* Social, but focused on content, not people
* It’s for sharing interest and passions but lets you go one step further
h4. Ben from Plaxo
* 5 year-old company
* Synchronized address book
* People have on average:
** 3-4 phone numbers
** 2-3 e-mail addresses
** 2-3 physical addresses
* And this information is always changing
* 33% of mobile phone numbers and 24% of e-mail addresses change annually
h4. Tariq Krim from Netvibes
* Create a single place for your entire digital life. Another personal portal.
* They have an open API for module developers.
* They have a public wiki for users to request features and report bugs
* They have a really cool live translating tool
* So they want to use “open standards”, but didn’t really say which ones
h4. Hans from Plum
* Connect with each others “heads”, not with dates.
* Collect data of all types and drop it into buckets
* “Communities of Knowledge”
* Tiny little application that runs and allows you to add anything you read into a collection.
* Wow… this is really cool. Collect anything from your desktop and throw it up into a collection. Neato.
* Everything is indexed and searchable.
* Works great on the Mac too. Yay!!
* Also allows you to connect to people with similar collections to yours.
* They dig microformats as well.
* They use Amazon’s S3 for the data.
h4. Discussion
* Collaborative Filtering
** imeem uses collaborative filtering to decide how popular or “good” something is. Compared to PageRank
** Plum called on “big” companies like Yahoo and AOL to come up with a good scheme for licensing documents or declaring document license. Time to go read up on rel license, isn’t it?
* Lot of talk of ownership while avoiding completely the topic of lock-in and open API’s. Oh well, we’ll talk about it in the next panel.