UltraNormal

This panel's all about how we can keep up of all the information that comes in every day. We're

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.