April 2012
1 post
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...
January 2012
1 post
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:
Know About It collection summaries aggregate from a larger collection of sources including: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, RSS Feeds and soon Google Plus.
While...
December 2011
1 post
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,...
August 2011
1 post
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...
July 2011
2 posts
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...
For Those Inundated by Social Media, Another... →
We were written up on the WSJ Digits blog today. Very cool!
June 2011
1 post
May 2011
1 post
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...
April 2011
2 posts
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...
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...
March 2011
3 posts
knowabout.it is really the result of product...
Most people probably don’t know it, but many of the features and ideas behind the current knowabout.it service evolved out of the wow.ly set of tools for social data.
I have been running and building these various little tools to help you *do* stuff with social data for the past couple of years. Some of the better and more popular ideas came from friends (for example conversationlist and...
Emotion drives knowabout.it
I recenetly came across this great video in my knowabout.it video stream. Besides just being fun to watch a younger Steve Jobs pull back the curatin a bit, it got me thinking directly about what sits at the core of knowabout.it.
For me, it goes beyond just defining what big problem we are trying to solve. I think about what emotion drives our product decisions. I think about what emotions we want...
Product Update: Collection Summary
Know About It’s Collection Summary has been a hit amongst our alpha users. So far we’ve seen staggering numbers (even at our scale) concerning how many people are reading the email, and how many users are clicking through to great content. This has been hugely encouraging to Kevin and I, so we wanted to focus a bit on one of our most popular features.
Today users can customize the...
February 2011
7 posts
Going All In and Risk
This is a re-post from Will Cole’s personal blog
Recently I decided to leave my job at Thomson Reuters to go all in on an unfunded startup that I started with Kevin Marshall. This was a remarkably easy decision, but one that took me a long time to even approach.
I’ve read about risk tolerance and how it’s a major factor in defining an entrepreneur (along with several other...
And we're back
We’re back from fixing up some back end issues and are opening up our alpha to a larger group. We’ve already brought in hundreds of new users from our waiting list, so if you haven’t signed up now is the perfect time!
knowabout.it thinks about 'Big Data' and machine...
Knowabout.it relies on a custom built aggregation platform (that we’ll eventually release more information on and an API into so everyone can play along with us). Like our whole company, this aggregation platform is in it’s early stages, but it’s already clear that we are going to be dealing with massive amounts of data very very quickly.
Getting to play with this massive data...
Down for Maintenance
Know About It alpha users will notice some down time today as we perform some scheduled maintenance. We’re currently moving over to amazon web services which will allow us to open up the site in a formal beta shortly.
We’ll let you know as soon as the site is back up!
Your Video Stream
The core concept of Know About It is surfacing interesting content that flows through your social streams in the form of links. Some of those links that come through your streams are videos, and if you spend any time checking Twitter or Facebook on you mobile phone or at work, chances are you skip over watching those videos in real time. I found myself missing out on lots of interesting content...
What does your tagline actually mean?
In case you haven’t come across it yet, this is the one-liner we use to describe know about it:
Knowabout.it tries to make sure that you ‘know about the great stuff’ passing through your social media services.
We think it’s pretty accurate in describing the basic idea of what we are trying to do…but you might be thinking, “Nice line and all but what does it...
Straight answers to tough questions.
For those of you that don’t know, in addition to improving the entire knowabout.it service, we’ve also started to hit the funding trail. We are trying to raise a small seed round (so we can build out the team a bit more and ramp up our overall efforts to get out of a closed-alpha stage).
In the course of these initial talks, we’ve been hit with all sorts of great feedback,...
January 2011
1 post
Popular
What is popular in your social streams and why does it matter?
There are a lot of ways to define what is popular in your streams:
Links that show up most frequently
# of Retweets
# of clicks on knowabout.it
bit.ly click counts
On their own or combined, these metrics let a user know what other people think is important. So why haven’t we spent more time on this in our alpha? Our...
December 2010
1 post
lukasoldenburg asked: What are "quiet sources"?
October 2010
2 posts
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?
We have been born. We are self aware. We continue...
knowabout.it is a new service from a brand new company called Digital Mechanical. Born in the mean streets of New York City, and built from the links passing through your social streams, knowabout.it gives you the worlds most powerful personal search engine.
It’s a world changing product with a lot of wrinkles we can’t wait for you to experience…and in the next few months...
