knowabout.it

We are shutting down Knowabout.it

Why are we giving up?

The short answer is a lack of money.

For Knowabout.it to work, it has to catch all the links being shared with you across all your social networks as well as all the content you yourself are generating across those networks, then it has to actually visit each of those links and index the content it finds there, finally a variety of algorithms are applied to every bit of content we’ve collected for you to determine which are most relevant to you.

While we’ve worked really hard to do as much as possible with as little as possible, the reality is that all that data collection and processing does adds up. Bootstrapping in this realm could only get us so far, and I think for a variety of reasons, we were never able to land the outside funding we desperately needed to take the system to the next level.

I believe we had a very unique and interesting approach that was working for our users on a personal level (the open rates on our daily emails were consistently in the 20-30% range and our unique user click rates were consistently in the 30-40% range every single day, even as our user numbers grew).

But we never cracked the ‘how to be viral’ puzzle, so gaining traction was proving to be a ‘long haul’ process (we continued to add a handful of new users ever day, but it was not a hockey stick by any means)…and we never came up with a revenue plan that worked prior to reaching critical mass (note to fellow entrepreneurs from captain obvious: ‘long haul growth’ with no immediate revenue plans is an express lane to guaranteed failure).

So we had what we believed to be a really good product with a massive amount of potential and a slowly growing and fairly engaged fan base, but we were slowly burning through our own bank accounts and had nothing on the horizon to signal this was going to change any time soon.

In the meantime, new competitors were coming out of the woodwork daily.

Some with better UI/UX and design. Some with better industry connections to help their product gain the general public’s attention. Some with deep pockets who could afford to hire more staff, take their time building out their product, and simply outlast the rest of us.

All of which really just segmented the potential user base and added to the confusion for all the users.

Ultimately you only need one recommendation engine (if you believe you need one at all — and many people don’t yet).

What were we to do?

To be honest, we’ve struggled with this reality for awhile now trying to figure out the best way to move forward.

We entertained a handful of acquisition opportunities, but in the end, none made enough sense on a personal level for Will and I to fully pursue. We also had some discussions around a pure assets and IP sale, but since we had no investors (other than ourselves) to satisfy, we ultimately decided that we would rather keep (and possibly repurpose) what we’ve built than have a fire sale.

By simply shutting down knowabout.it (and the current version of pu.ly by extension) we can afford to keep up some of the support services we’ve built up around it like halfbite.com and uridata.com alive, and we are free to reuse parts of our proprietary recommendation algorithms and processes in our other projects as we see fit ( like my latest, specifically for sports fans, http://turfd.com ).

So while we are sad to have failed to keep knowabout.it alive long enough to evolve into the world-changing service we knew it could be…we are proud of having played the game our way, relieved to be exiting on our own terms, and excited to be heading on to the next game - literally.

Hopefully one of the other services that remain will eventually fill the hole we are leaving (personally I’ve got high hopes for both news.me and getprismatic.com)…and more importantly, I hope that those of you that took the time and interest to go on this journey with us will join us on the next trip as well.

I can’t guarantee that it will be any more successful the next time around, but I can promise we’ll continue to do our best and always try to make it as fun and personally useful to you as possible!

Hello Summify Users

For those Summify users who will soon be looking for a new service for their daily social summaries, we’re happy to have you join us!  While our products are quite similar, let us tell you a few things you can expect to be different:

1. Know About It collection summaries aggregate from a larger collection of sources including: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, RSS Feeds and soon Google Plus.
2. While sites like Summify focused primarily on top or popular stories, that is just one aspect of KAI (although you can customize your feed to only include those stories if desired).  The most powerful aspect of KAI are the personalized recommendations.  These are stories from your social streams that our algorithms have picked based on your interests.  So whether or not the story is retweeted frequently or clicked on by other users, we’ve picked it just for you.
3. See what some of your quieter friends have been saying by adding Hidden Gems to your daily summary.  These are folks you follow, but don’t blog or tweet much so you’re likely missing what they have to say.  
4. Use Pu.ly  for some fun “pulling” new content from your social streams on a desktop experience.  Puly is powered by Know About It data and is a great way to catch up on your favorite content if you have a few minutes to spare.

Overall, the email experience will be very familiar to you.  Our process of digging up the most relevant and engaging content is a bit different from Summify’s, but we hope you’ll enjoy the personalized experience.  And of course, shoot @falicon or @willcole a note if you have any questions or have any feature requests.

introducing the re-imagined pu.ly

When it comes to content consumption, I think there are two primary directions software can be built to help. Software can be built to save you time, or it can be built to kill your time.

knowabout.it was designed from the ground up to be in the ‘save you time’ category. All of our views and all of our recommendations are designed with the idea of helping you quickly, and easily, discover the most engaging and relevant links lost in your social streams.

If we are doing it right (and our engagement numbers suggest that we are at least on the right track), then our users are spending less and less time trying to keep up with each social network and at the same time getting more and more of the ‘good stuff’.

Admittedly, it’s not a perfect system yet (though we do continue to improve and evolve it every day), but we do feel good with our start. And many of our (awesome) users have given us really great feedback encouraging us to keep going.

But one of the things we’ve consistently heard from our users is that, even though they love our service for saving them time and cutting out the noise, there are some times when they just want to kill a little time discovering interesting content too.

So we’ve finally built an app just for that too!

It’s called http://pu.ly and we believe it’s the most powerful discovery engine available for the social web. But don’t just take our word for it, why not give it a spin for yourself right now at http://pu.ly

Read It Later & Instapaper Awesomness

One of our guiding themes at Know About It is that we want to deliver your content to wherever you are most comfortable.  First step was email, and now you can get your favorite stories sent from Know About It to Read It Later & Instapaper.  There are two ways to do this:

Send your entire collection summary to either Read It Later or Instapaper instead of receiving the daily email.  

Hook up either service in your account settings:

Then go to your summary settings and elect to receive the daily collection summary via Instapaper or Read It Later.

Now you’ll receive you’re daily summary in whichever service you prefer.

Lastly, you can send individual articles to either service via any single result.  Here you see each link has the option to “Save It”.  Once you’ve hooked up Instapaper or Read It Later, you can save an article and it will immediately push the link to either service.

Weekend Roundup

We’re excited to be out of the closed alpha stage and opened to the public.  Here are some of the stories that have helped thousands of new users enjoy Know About It:

WSJ Digits

ReadWriteWeb

Lifehacker

Mashable

During this beta period we’ll be working hard to scale the system and provide a reliable way for you to get the most personalized and relevant content.  We rely heavily on your feedback to fix issues and provide new features, so please feel free to reach out to us any time at info@knowabout.it

Your Time vs. Real Time

We frame Know About It’s usefulness as a balance between your time and real time.  What this means is that Know About It is not the site to replace your real time consumption of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, RSS feeds, or any of the current and future sources that have real time consumption elements.  We believe that your time is more valuable than real time, and that real time data needs to be carefully analyzed in order to make it usable when you can’t keep up.

Real time works just fine when you’re parked in front of TweetDeck, Twitter,  Tumblr, or Google Reader; but you have to sleep.  You spend time traveling, eating, and maybe even working.  What do you do when someone sends you a link to a video and you see this message on you’re way to work via the Twitter mobile app?  We’ve seen that you don’t consume this in real time.  What if you receive four such links while you’re out to dinner?

The point is that these situations are inevitable and constant.  Most of our users have over 400 links passing through their streams every day. If you’re highly engaged, you may interact with 10% of the content that you’ve opted into.  Why only consume those 40 links in the confines of real time?  Know About It offers a few alternatives:

1. Recommended Content - Based on who you follow, what you say, and what you read.
2. View by media type - Check out just videos, photos, or music in your social streams.
3. Quiet Sources - Find content from those people who get drowned out in crowded dashboards.
4. Friends - See what you’re friends are reading, writing, watching, and listening to. Ultimately, this will be a great browsing experience and connect you with people and sources you otherwise would not have found.  

We need better ways to optimize what content we pay attention to.  Normal users have bitten off more than they can chew in real time, and there is a shift occurring to bring enhanced functionality to users on their own time.  Kevin and I hope to be the leaders in this shift.

A system where everyone wins.

There are a lot of of reasons why I’m so excited to be building knowabout.it, but I think one of the biggest reasons is beacuse it’s truly a system where everyone wins.

That’s a pretty bold statement, so let me explain what I mean by that.

As I see it, we’ve really got three players invovled in what we do: the user, the publishers, and the social networks…and knowabout.it is uniquely positioned so that we add a ton of value to each.

Here’s a little more detail on how we do that for each:

Real People - a.k.a. the users.

There definitely is too much information flowing through social streams for the average person to keep up with.

Users really are missing most of it, and worse, the stuff they are missing often is the most engaging and relevant content to their personal interests.

By simply turning on a source or two within knowabout.it we can point all this stuff out to you in a very clean, simple, and easy-to-consume, on-your-own-time, at-your-own-pace sort of way.

All of which means, at it’s core knowabout.it is solving a HUGE problem for real people.

Content Generators - a.k.a. the publishers

The knowabout.it mission is simply to find and point out the most engaging and relevant content to our users.

We are not focused on the consumption experience or even in creating ‘stickyness’ for our own site. In fact, we often say the faster we get our users from our service to the actual content (on a publisher’s site) the better we are doing our job.

What this means is that, when we are doing our job right, knowabout.it drives additional traffic to publishers and gives a publisher’s best content more opportunities for users to discover it.

Social Networks - a.k.a. the platforms

We feel that a large part of solving the relevance puzzle for our users has to do with context.

So we feel it’s VERY important for our users to know specifically who is sharing the best links within their social networks, what is being said about those links, and which networks those links are flowing through.

To go one step further, we also provide various tools and encourage our users to share back the best links they find.

This helps knowabout.it users stay actively engaged within these networks and ultimately drives more traffic back to each as well.

What do you think?

These are just some of my quick thoughts on how knowabout.it is designed to be a system where everyone wins…but I would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments…or even better, I would love to have you try knowabout.it out yourself and then let me know if it’s helping you WIN!

Managing Content Overload

Let’s forget for a minute that the average Know About It user has 500 links flowing through their social streams daily.

Taking just one prolific source like TechCrunch serves as an interesting use case for Know About It.

As of 7:45 PM EST on 4/12/11 TechCrunch had posted 38 articles in a 24 hour span.  There will probably be around 45 by the end of the day.

Unless this is your only source for news, it’s unlikely you had the time to read each post.  

Today I read three posts from TechCrunch:

1. http://knwbt.it/hbISWf  Found via a recommendation from my RSS feed.
   
   
2. http://knwbt.it/e2gEWy Found via a recommendation from Chris Dixon in my Twitter feed.
   
   
3. http://knwbt.it/fE6CUJ Found via compare with friends feature in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s collection (original tweet from @RobinGood - pretty cool right?)
   
   

There are a few reasons I think this is awesome.

First, I browsed through my TechCrunch RSS feed and decided there was only one other article I was interested in today that Know About It didn’t surface to me (always room to improve).

Second, I got the context of why each article was relevant to me because the stories were delivered with the tweets or reasons for recommendation intact.

Lastly, the article I found by peeking into Marshall’s collection was actually from yesterday.

Mark Suster has written twice recently that Twitter data is ephemeral.  I agree with this, and Know About It helps extend the lifespan of social data to surface content whenever it’s relevant to you, not just when it’s published.  

We hope that people use Know About It in conjunction with Twitter, RSS Feeds, Facebook, or anywhere else you consume real time or social content.

If your time is limited though, we’re going to be the best place for your first glance at what’s been happening in your world.  

So don’t get overwhelmed and don’t miss the good stuff in your social streams. Sign up for our alpha and give it a spin.