know about it

We are shutting down Knowabout.it

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:13:32 -0400

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

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:06:08 -0500

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 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.
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.
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

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:56:46 -0500

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

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:21:23 -0400

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

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:18:18 -0400

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:

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

For Those Inundated by Social Media, Another Filter

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:59:04 -0400

For Those Inundated by Social Media, Another Filter:

We were written up on the WSJ Digits blog today. Very cool!

Coming soon…

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:09:43 -0400

Coming soon…

Your Time vs. Real Time

Thu, 19 May 2011 00:44:26 -0400

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:

Recommended Content - Based on who you follow, what you say, and what you read.
View by media type - Check out just videos, photos, or music in your social streams.
Quiet Sources - Find content from those people who get drowned out in crowded dashboards.
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.

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 22:34:00 -0400

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

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:57:00 -0400

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:

http://knwbt.it/hbISWf Found via a recommendation from my RSS feed.
http://knwbt.it/e2gEWy Found via a recommendation from Chris Dixon in my Twitter feed.
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.

knowabout.it is really the result of product evolution

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:20:00 -0400

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 eli.st were ideas from Whitney McNamara, pu.ly was an idea from Andrew Parker, tym.ly was an idea from Kiril Savino, and gawk.it was an idea from Brian Litvack) and some of the lesser ideas came from my own wants or needs.

But regardless of where the inspiration for each came from, the work that went into each (and the limited success or failure of each) allowed me to gain a ton of insight into the mindset of real users within social networks.

Here’s a quick list of some of the projects and one or two insights I gained from each:

conversationlist.com - There is a lot of (hidden) value in the actions you are already doing within social networks. Also people really like set-it-and-forget-it features…and, though obvious, building viral features directly into the core of the product is the best/cheapest possible path to product adoption.

eli.st - Everyone wants to group/filter/view people in their own way. People really want to flip the idea of “keeping up with the Jones” to “Let the Jones lead me to the good stuff”.

friendstat.us - Curretly the noisy people in social networks win…and in doing so, often drown out the true quality (social networks really are quantity over quality right now). Also - even before Twitter announced it, it’s an uphill battle to get adoption to something that’s really just a *different* interface to Twitter (ie. you gotta add serious value if you are going to bother to build on top of someone’s API)

fubnub.com - People want to move data from system to system around the internet…but you have to make it super easy (I think tumblr is probably the closest to having figured this out right now and even they really only do it with data within tumblr). Though it’s really just copy/paste…the average person doesn’t really *get* this yet (too early and too complex).

fuzzypop.com - relying on a browser extension is currently a near impossible barrier to overcome. You can’t rely soely on network effects…systems have to start by solving a problem for the individual user first.

gawk.it - text-based or text-driven systems are too difficult for normal users to understand and too much work for them to adopt. Also, timing is everything and being too early is just as much a killer as being too late.

hotaround.me - there actually isn’t that much interesting, and especially personally relevant, data available on the local front yet (unless you live in NYC - and even then there’s not as much available as you might think). Again, being too early is a non-start (I do believe a market will eventually emerge around this…and there’s a ton of action around the internet trying to make this happen)

instapaperfeed.com - people really want a no-effort way of getting great content served up to them (ie. the job great writers and editors used to do to make mainstream publications so popular). The average user does seem to believe algorithms and the computer *can* do this work now (and I mostly agree — though I feel there still is a *huge* opportunity for great writers/editors/curators to help with this problem too).

jivegas.com - there’s a lot of interseting data hidden inside of many of the lesser known/used API endpoints of these social networks (I never released a tool around this stuff, but I was playing with a lot of fun ideas around just who you follow, who follows you, when you followed them, and so on and so forth).

likefeature.com - The easiest way to get people to *get* your view or adopt your idea is to just *show* it to them…let them actually experience it. Or put better, let the product talk for itself. Also, internet buzz and heated debates do not directly relate to user attention or adoption (just because people are complaining about an incumbent doesn’t mean they won’t continue to use their service/feature).

pu.ly - email is still a *killer* platform/feature/service. People really don’t want to miss out on stuff…and time is a really horrible way to engage with media as a consumer (though it makes perfect sense and is great for a publisher).

storyrank.com - If you have an audience of even just one…and rely soley on algorithms people will eventually try to game the system. (note: I have long since killed this initial project and we are going to use this domain as part of what we are putting into our knowabout.it search algorithms/process).

tagli.st - There’s so much more that can/should be done with lists and groups (which I guess is *obvious* when you think about what it really means to be social)…context is *extremely* important.

timelylinks.com - Scaling is a HUGE problem when dealing with links passing through social streams. Also as long as you solve a problem in someone’s mind, you *have* solved the problem (regardless of if they are really getting/doing what they *think* they are). It’s all about mental comfort for a user.

tym.ly - You need to start with a service that’s useful/relevant on a personal level, then expand it to be even more useful/relevant as more users adopt the system. There are still some areas within social data that contain serious privacy issues (scheduling is one of those areas). It’s really hard to get users to add a task to their routine…and if that ‘task’ consistently requires more than one step, it’s near impossible (or the payoff needs to be completely game-changing).

So there’s a lot more that came out of each of these little tools (and many of my quick notes above probably don’t do each ‘lesson’ justice)…and especially from the experience as a whole of building and (still) running most of these…and perhaps I’ll dig into more of them in a future post (as well as some of the things I’ve learned in many of the other projects outside of social data I’ve built/run).

For now though, I think the important thing is that we are taking all of this experience and knowledge and using to drive everything we do within knowabout.it

But don’t just take my word for it…come check it out for yourself and let us know how we’re doing so far!

Emotion drives knowabout.it

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:07:00 -0400

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 our users to experience when they think about our service and the knowabout.it brand.

In fact, I would say focusing on emotions and the answers to these sorts of questions actually helped Will and I to clarify in our own heads just what ‘big problem’ we are really solving.

When we first started talking about the idea of knowabout.it (around August 2010) we thought people were not getting enough out of their social streams because the state of social search just wasn’t good enough (or more accurately we thought existing social search services were focused on the wrong window of data).

Fast forward a few thousand lines of code, a handful of awesome active alpha users, and a couple of months in time and what you see is that we actually learned search wasn’t the real problem (at least not yet).

What we found was, most people don’t even know what is passing through their social streams.

…and so search, no matter your approach or how good, doesn’t even make sense to the average person yet. How can you try to find something when you don’t even know what the system you are searching might contain? How can you have any reasonable expecations of what a ‘good result’ might or might not be? How do you even know when to search?

So it was clear to us, the real problem in social right now is discovery.

…and in our own personal experiences (and past projects), we felt the key to discovery within social boils down to three basic, core beliefs:

1. People still make the best filters.

2. You already do enough work.

3. Your time is more important than real time.

Each of these points are worthy of in-depth discussions (and probably entire books themselves) but right now I’ll just give a quick explaination of what I mean on each.

People make the best filters.

I’m a developer at heart. The primary thing that I bring to the table is technology and so far, just about every single line of code behind the knowabout.it system has been generated by me. So you can safely assume that I think technology can provide a TON of value to almost any problem.

But the reality is that technology in itself is still pretty stupid. It’s fairly easy to game. It can’t make what I would define as a real judgement call. It has no real emotion (there’s that word again). And worst of all, pure technology solutions really just aren’t personal in any way (unless you really fall to the mean within a demographic).

Meanwhile, these are all things that actual people are just naturally great at. So why not take advantage of that? So for me, when you are trying to solve a problem for real people, the smartest way to apply technology to that problem is on top of real people actions.

You already do enough work.

You’ve already done all the work of finding and following people you are interested in. You already engage in conversations within your social networks (implicitly defining your interests and the things that are currently on your mind). You’ve already filled out enough profile information around the various parts of the internet.

To me, you should be able to get INSANE value out of all this already public and available information on what you’re doing and what you’re interested in.

Your time is more important than real time.

As much as I love Twitter and the other social networks, I can’t pay attention to them all day (and honestly I don’t want to). I’ve got real work to do (or at least I did before I left that and started this company with Will). I’ve got two amazing kids and an amazing wife that I enjoy going out into the real world with, doing real-world things.

Sure I still want all great stuff that comes out of social networks and the people I follow…but I want it when I’ve got time for it. And when I do have time for it, I don’t want to have to do a lot of work (see point above) or waste a lot of time to find that value.

The problem is, when I log into any of my social networks today…I’m presented with whatever is happening right now. What if the best stuff, the stuff I would be most interested in, was posted when I was out and about in the real world? In some cases, I can go back in time and try to catch up…but it’s a lot of work, and it takes way too much of my time for very limited return.

How does this all tie into emotion?

I started this rambling post talking about emotion and what sorts of emotions I want our users to feel about knowabout.it…and then dug a little into what we’ve learned so far and what core assumptions we are operating under so that I could share a little bit more about where my head is at.

So now that the ground work has been laid, what emotional response do I actually hope for from our users?

I want people to feel relaxed.

Relaxed to the point that they no longer have to worry about missing something good from their social streams. Relaxed to the point that they don’t feel like they have to always be logged on, plugged in, and immediately available*.

The hope is that, over time, our users think of us as trusted teammate that they can rely on to carry the game when they need a break.

We know it’s long path we are on.

There is not going to be a simple solution, and there is going to be a lot of competition (every day we learn of some one new who is also playing on the same data set). But we feel like we are already making great progress, and we are super excited for the journey…and we really hope, now that the curtain is pulled back a little for you, you’ll want to make the trip with us!

* Interestingly enough, this flies almost directly in contrast with the whole idea of the mobile movement that is so hot in my technology circles these days…and I actually feel really good about this fact.

Product Update: Collection Summary

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:07:27 -0500

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 Collection Summary by:

Scheduling the time of day the summary is sent
Adding in New Additions, Videos, or Music section
Controlling the number of links per section included in your summary (ie 8 Quiet Sources links, 7 of each Recommendation etc…)

Following these updates, look out for a few more in the next few days:

Adding the Popular section to your Collection Summary
Scheduling a weekly email instead of daily
A simpler UI for making these changes

These updates are very alpha, but considering the reception we’ve received from users, we wanted to get the most requested features out right away. Let us know in the comments what’s working, and more importantly, what doesn’t work for you.

Note: If you update your settings to receive an email at a new time, but have already received an email the day you make the change, the new email will not be sent out until the following day.

Going All In and Risk

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:20:55 -0500

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 things) and realized it was a characteristic that I thought I had myself, but wasn’t demonstrating. I’ve considered myself an entrepreneur since we first started Chalq in early 2007, but even then it was a nights and weekends project for me (Matt and Napoleon did work on the company full time). I wasn’t able to go all in on Chalq because I hadn’t properly identified my risk profile.

Since Chalq failed in 2008, I’ve made a point to put myself in a better position to succeed in my next company. Specifically:

I’ve saved money by significantly cutting down my living costs (my main risk concern).
I spent 2 years aggressively building my network of entrepreneurs and investors.
I’ve spent significant time in defining and refining what I believe are the skills needed by a non-tech founder of a web company (this will be an entirely separate post).

What is important is identifying what your risk tolerance on a personal level is. For me it was the $0 mark and related to #1 above. I didn’t want to go into debt, so I made sure that if I created another opportunity I would execute on it without it feeling risky. For others it may be something completely different (opportunity costs, knowledge insecurity, confidence in your idea/team, etc…), but knowing what it is makes all the difference.

If your dream is to build things from scratch and own what you build, identify what those points of risk are and eliminate them. It took me 3 years to do this properly, and now I have the chance to work on my dream. The best part is, it doesn’t feel the least bit risky.

And we're back

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 09:49:03 -0500

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 learning.

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:33:00 -0500

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 set is actually one of the things, as a developer, that has had me excited in the project from the very start. It’s the reason I’ve been so interested in Twitter itself from the early days, and the bit of a hidden agenda behind many of my wow.ly hacks.

So it’s true, I’m addicted to the possibilities of ‘Big Data’. But this is also why I’m so disappointed with the current state of ‘Big Data’.

Sure, Netflix*, Amazon*, Google, and Bing are doing awesome things with massive data sets, but I think they are the exception to the normal right now.

In my opinion, ‘Big Data’ right now seems to be used to mostly create artificial intelligence (A.I.) that is stereotypical and prejudice.

“Your a woman that just turned 30, an ad for wrinkle cream is appropriate.”

What I mean is that it seems like most ‘Big Data’ plays are so focused on modeling towards the middle that they lose any real chance at being true A.I.

To me, the real path to A.I. is all about taking massive data and using it to ‘learn’ about individuals.

Let’s take a slightly different angle and look at it from the perspective of a parent, would you raise your own child to aspire to the middle? Would you want them to make assumption about people based on the average of what they’ve experienced in life so far?

Or would you like them to listen first, learn about each individual with fresh ears and an open mind, and only then apply their life experiences?

This is how I like to think I’m raising my kids, and this is how I also like to think about approaching the problem of dealing with ‘Big Data’.

With knowabout.it, we’re aggregating gobs-o-social data that we treat as our collective experience…but we don’t calculate averages and we don’t try to generalize our users into nice marketing-friendly buckets.

Instead, we listen to them.

We learn what things they are doing themselves within social streams. We watch what things we point out to them that result in clicks. We pay attention to what they specifically say they like and don’t like around the social web.

Basically we do everything we can to really ‘learn’ about the individual. And as we’re doing this learning, watching, and listening we apply our collective experience to the individual situation.

Again it’s early stages with our approach, and like a child that’s new to the world, knowabout.it has got a lot to learn and a lot of growing to do…but we’re pretty happy with our start.

Ultimately though, it doesn’t matter what we think of our approach…it’s what you, as the user, thinks that really matters. So why not take a look, play with the system a bit, and then let us know what you think!

* I view Netflix and Amazon as special cases because they are really about recommending products, and product recommendation is one unique area that ‘popular’ or ‘on average’ kinda makes sense. That is, I feel like transactional behavior can be averaged out and there is very little-to-no-cost for poor recommendations within these services. I’ll try to write more on this thinking soon.

Down for Maintenance

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:19:11 -0500

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

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:26:00 -0500

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 friends were sharing with me because it just wasn’t the right time for me to fire up YouTube. That’s what Know About It’s video section is all about.

Under the browse section, Videos extracts all of the YouTube clips that flow through your various sources and puts them all into one place organized chronologically. This is your personal web TV station.

Recently I caught Howard Stern’s appearance on David Letterman:

Like all other results, we show you how and when this video made it into your collection along with all the context associated with it.

What cool stuff have you watched that you wouldn’t have otherwise?

What does your tagline actually mean?

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:57:00 -0500

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 really mean?”

Well I’m glad you asked that, because it actually means a lot!

First, we believe social media, in it’s current infant state, is a double-edged sword.

On the plus side, you can connect with an endless stream of people and ideas easier than ever before.

This means there is always something interesting happening and you can actually get in on the action yourself. You can become part of the conversations and be exposed to people and things that you would never have had a chance to experience before.

Endless information and opportunity is truly at your fingertips twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

On the down side, you can connect with an endless stream of people and ideas easier than ever before.

This means there is no way you can keep up with everything that’s actually going on or all the people you are likely to find interesting. And in fact, the data* from our small alpha has confirmed that there’s too much data flowing through the average users social media stream for them to reasonably keep up with.

So here’s the real delima:

How do you keep up with the people you’re interested in, read the stuff they’re pointing out to you that’s truly relevant to your intersets, and still have time to exist and funciton in the ‘real’ world?

This is where knowabout.it, and our tagline from above, comes in.

To be quite honest with you, what we are actually doing isn’t all that hard to understand (though ‘how’ we achieve it most likely is).

We’re just making the computer do the grunt work of paying attention to everything flowing through your social streams (ie. read it)…and based on how you interact with those streams and the data you generate yourself, you train the computer** to recognize the stuff you really do want to know about.

If we do it right, we’ll free you from feeling as if you need to constantly, manually, monitor your social streams while at the same time making sure that none of the ‘best stuff’ (as defined by you) slips through the cracks anymore.

The best part of it all is that you get to be the judge of how well we are doing it! So what are you waiting for? Check us out, and let us ‘know about’ your thoughts!

* We have seen an average of 300-500 links to content pass through our users streams every single day. That’s like trying to read a 300-500 page book of random content each and every day.

** Yes, ultimately, we are all about machine learning!

Straight answers to tough questions.

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:01:00 -0500

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, comments, and questions.

Some of these conversations have pointed out things we were totally missing. Some have made us think long-and-hard about our initial assumptions and our long term goals. And some have just been really fun and motivating to spend some time on.

Overall we’ve been enjoying the process (and learning a ton) and we feel like we are making great progress as well…but recently we got a set of questions from a friend (who also happens to be an Angel investor we REALLY respect) that I thought were so great they (and the related answers) were worth sharing here with everyone.

So what follows are the questions asked of us (in bold) and my short/basic free-flowing answers (I could, given the chance, ramble on for hours about each of these — so be careful not ask these if you happen to catch me for drinks one night!)

What problem are you solving?

Knowabout.it tries to make sure that you ‘know about the good stuff’ passing through your social media services.

Who is your target audience to use the product?

Anyone that uses social media services like Twitter, Facebook, or Google Buzz but doesn’t have the time or energy to monitor them 24/7.

How are you going to get it in their hands?

Word of mouth and advertising via social media services, in-service sharing features, strategic partnerships with front-end application services, and eventually more traditional PR and advertising routes.

Who is going to pay you money and what value are they going to garner (even if it’s a guess today)?

Content generators who want to extend their reach and acquire more targeted followers. Brands who want targeted exposure and detailed analysis of the effectiveness of their messages.

Why are you better than the competition?

1. We focus on being ‘dead-simple’. Other than turning it on, we require no ‘new’ action on the users part and there’s nothing new they have to ‘remember’ to take advantage of the service.

2. Our recommendation and classification algorithms are based on what we learn from how you interact with what we present you and the content you are already generating across your social streams…as well as analyzing the content behind the links passing through your streams.

3. Our search includes the content behind the links flowing through your streams as well as what the people you follow are saying about that content. This means you don’t get just ‘good’ results, you get a better understanding of ‘why’ and from ‘who’ you are getting the results you get.

4. Our social filters trim out the fat from the streams you peek into, so you can see the real picture of what others you are interested in are being exposed to that you aren’t.

How can I help?

At this stage, we are looking for a small amount of seed funding to be used to build out the team a bit more and ramp up our back end systems (ie. get ready to really scale). So if you are an angel or early stage investor we would love to talk to you.

If you’re not a potential investor, but want to get involved in building the company with us…we’d also love to talk to you.

If you’re just someone that suffers from information overload via your social streams…we’d love to have you give our alpha a try at http://knowabout.it (and then we’d love to talk to you too!).

And finally, if you’ve just got someone else you think we need to be talking to…we’d appreciate that introduction too.