Searchyogi

Here is the Powerset email.

powerset website

Originally uploaded by Search Yogi

I got an email from Powerset that they are fully live. However, a visit to the site shows that the searches are restricted to Wikipedia only. That’s a complete let down!

Business Week is going to do a story/article as a twitter stream i.e. in 140 character chunks. The interesting part of the experiment being that the writer Stephen Baker will develop  the story based on the responses to each tweet.

Business week to twitter away

The folks at Google have a great note today about what they focus on in terms of design principles. Here are the takeaways I especially liked from their list:

Googleys according to Searchyogi

1. Simplicity is powerful.

2. Design for the world.

3. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.

4. Engage beginners and attract experts.

5. Be worthy of people’s trust.

Look at Mike Arrington’s picture - As featured in Time Top 100. Nothing like having the smug look and gloating over being a king maker!

I have spoken about information overload in couple of other posts. Robert Scoble’s RSS feed page has the following note on it:

I’m a tech geek blogger who reads hundreds of feeds every night from around the tech world. I pick the best items for you from about 800 feeds and try to get interviews with the most interesting people in the technology world.

Scanning 800 feeds seems like a LOT! In addition to all the near real-time twittering that Scoble has to do! This got me thinking about what is the variance of sources in his shared items. I am not sure if there is a Google RSS feed API, but it will be an interesting project for someone to look at the variance of sources in the shared items on a statistical basis. Given the finite bandwidth of human processing, my guess is that there would be low variance in sources on a daily basis. Perhaps one coping mechanism would be to look at a different bunch of sources everyday so that they fall in rotation over a few weeks. Of course, the problem here is that technology moves fast and information gets old very quickly.

How do you cope with this overload?

I met Kevin Marks at the data portability meet-up. Here is an interesting post from him on Technorati ranking. Kevin was at Technorati between 2003-2007 and was responsible for their spiders which tracked the millions of blogs across the web.

All Bloggers are Above Average

Check out this twitter app: twistori

Its very cool. Shows messages that contain words love, hate, feel, think, believe and wish. It reminds me of wall mounted screen at Googleplex that shows search queries from around the world being done on Google at that moment.

As I open myself up to the information deluge through Twitter, Friend feed and the 100s of feeds in my Google Reader, I find that the mind can focus and digest only so much. As these tools go mainstream, I expect that this problem will become more pronounced. As one would expect, apps are being built on top of Twitter and Friend feed that will alleviate this problem.

I have been testing twhirl, Alert Thingy and Feedalizr. While twhirl and Alert thingy mainly help in reading and responding to tweets and (friendfeeds?), Feedalizr has filters that can be enabled so that only certain tweets can be seen in the client. For example, I set a filter for “investor” and the application only showed messages containing this word. This is only the beginning and I expect more sophisticated information filters to come along that will alleviate this firehose of messages.

On the heels of my post about Jonathan Schwartz CEO plugging Aggregate knowledge, I was reminded about another event from the past. Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme was speaking at the Stanford Venture lab panel. As part of the discussion, he announced that the site funnyordie was going live. His spin on it was that it was an amateur effort by his teenage son who had spawned the idea and had roped in actor Will Ferrel into the project as well.
This had the intended effect on me and I was wowed by the ingeniousness of the folks involved. However, I later found that it was a well-orchestrated start-up and not a serendipitous accident as it was projected to be. No doubt Mark had full reason to plug his start-up, but I felt this was a mis-representation.