While we're on the topic of personalization and filters... there's a new project called Linktamer currently under construction that looks like it could be a Web-based tool to find the most interesting stories from your feeds based on your interests, relying heavily on your direct feedback to stories, and the tags describing them. While there's been no mention thus far of the service's plans for a public debut, a Twitter account (@linktamer) exists, possibly waiting for the day it's officially unveiled.

Like many other services, including my6sense and others described in last night's post, Linktamer breaks the latest news into two separate streams - that of the most recent content, and that ordered by your own assumed preferences, garnered based on inputs to the system. Every item contains the option to give future similar stories more value, or less, and with more development, it looks like there is future opportunity to sort stories by specific topic and drill down to find the best by subject, although that's not yet enabled.


Much like the prototypical RSS reader, Linktamer streams in items, each providing a publish date, a headline, and a source. Linktamer extracts a lead graphic for those stories that have one, extracts about a dozen tags that describe the article, and delivers a score called "Signal", an analysis of how interesting that story is to the logged in user. Stories with no relevance have a rating of 00, with most relevance increasing presumably to 100.


To provide feedback for items in the system, there are four actions for each post on Linktamer. One can like an item by clicking the heart symbol, click the X to say you are "not interested" in the post (or others of its type, click the checkmark to indicate it has been read, or the arrow to share it - most likely to external social networks (though this is not yet implemented).


What Linktamer provides now is a raw hint at what could be another interesting alternative to personalized RSS streams - one that doesn't look to rely heavily (if at all) on collaborative filtering or simple popularity as many other services do, and starts with the Web while many others have kept their focus on mobile devices. The project appears to be thee brainchild of Alan Grow, who may emerge to claim it as time to launch approaches. Looking forward to seeing this one develop.

Disclosures: As noted often, I am vice president of marketing at my6sense, focused on personalization of news and social streams, much like Linktamer's future mission could be.

Eli Pariser, former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, is a smart guy who knows the Web very well. His most recent work takes on the movement toward services that adopt algorithm-driven personalization to provide you individualized content - which he calls "The Filter Bubble", matching a book he recently wrote by the same name. His summary, as eloquently stated during a TED talk in March, is that we as Web consumers are going to miss being exposed to information that challenges our views, that we will self-select our sources and content we wish to consume, and the services will comply. The result? A dangerous world, he argues, that is bad for democracy, and no doubt bad for knowledge as well.

Spending considerable amount of time thinking about the impact of machine-driven personalization as VP of Marketing at my6sense, as well as being an early adopter of many other tools that adopt various factors of personalization, from The Cadmus to Zite, Flipboard, Hunch, Cascaad and others, it is important to think about the impact of our efforts to bring personal relevance to the fast-moving Web and if we are indeed pushing people instead to a house of mirrors where most things look the same and the comfortable world agrees with our world view.

First, the argument that people prefer to associate with like-minded individuals and listen, read and watch news and commentary that agrees with their worldview is pretty well accepted. In politics, conservatives may prefer Fox News for their media, while liberals prefer CNN and MSNBC. This is exacerbated dramatically further on the Web with niche discussions becoming even easier to find. Way back in February 2006, when this blog was pretty new, I talked about how people don't usually want to mingle with people of opposing views, but instead that views become polarized as communities flock to the edge, where they are comfortable.

Quoting my 28 year-old self:

"To measure credibility on the Web, visitors are looking for people who already agree with their opinions. They're not so much looking to be changed or to gain information from other viewpoints, but to instead become more hardened in their positions."
(See: Blogging Bifurcation - A Web Divided from February 23, 2006)

No matter the media, be it online or offline, we self-select what we consume based on a vast number of criteria.

We first self-select the source of our content - for example (in a world of dead tree papers) the New York Times, instead of the Washington Post or USA Today. Then, we choose how we are going to consume the content, be it to skim the front page first, or to dive into the business section. Perhaps we always read Sports first and then go back to the front page, and finally settle on the Features section. What we don't do is read every single story from beginning to end starting at the top left and moving to the back. Similarly, on television, we have our favorite shows, and again, we have preferences. We don't tun the TV on to channel one and hit the "up" button on our remote control until we find something we like. Instead, we choose our watching behavior based on our interests, and in a world of DVRs, we watch our favorite shows and limit our options to even be exposed to commercials highlighting other fare on the same network.


What new tools like my6sense and others are doing is recognizing that this capability of accurately divining the order of your preferences is largely missing in a new world of real-time streams. No man, not even the cyborg tech bloggers among us, can read every single tweet, Facebook update, Techmeme headline or news story that crests The Drudge Report. What my6sense and others like it are trying to do is eliminate the noise which you will never be interested in, while at the same time, surfacing the content which is deemed important to you based on your interests. No two people consume content in the same way, so presenting the content in the same way to each person (as has been done for centuries) doesn't make too much sense any more. It makes more sense, both for the user and for the content producer, to bring the best and most relevant content to the right people who want to see it and engage with it.

The concerns raised by Pariser are absolutely valid if the services being personalized don't offer any way for content that has not previously shown interest to come into your sphere. If the only signals that you've given to a service are that you like Apple computers and NBA playoff scores, and that's all you'll get, you'll have a poor understanding of the 2012 presidential election race and probably might not have noticed the fluctuations in the price of gas.

In my6sense, there are two critical ways that make sure you don't stay in your bubble forever:

1) There is always the option to view your streams sorted "by Time". Always.

Every single application that we have provided, from our iPhone and Android applications, to the NOOKColor application with Barnes and Noble, and even the Twitter extension on Chrome, offers a "relevance" tab based on your interests right next to the traditional chronologically-ordered view. There's no winner take all algorithm that erases the time view, because we know you should always have the option to see what your connections and feeds are saying "right now".

What's being discussed in the "Time" column could be anything. It could directly fall into your interests, or it could be something completely random, and that never will go away.

2) Collaborative filtering, while not the dominant signal, is still a signal.

If I have trained my application to know that I have a strong liking for technology news and consume this most of the day, it's unlikely that I will have previously given information that signals any interest in Osama Bin Laden's death or the earthquake in Japan. That said, if an event occurs that gets the attention of many of my social connections who begin to discuss it or share items on that topic, the system should interpret that as a strong social signal and surface this content in the application, so that alongside my regular Android ecosystem updates, I retain the option for breaking news.

In November, I wrote that "The Third Wave of the Web Will Be Uniquely Personal", as services adapt to my preferences and history to bring me a unique experience. We see this happening with Gmail's Priority Inbox, Google News personalization, the Facebook news feed and many other tweaks to our Web consumption experience. This doesn't mean that we are going to opt ourselves into a bubble by which we are never exposed to opposing viewpoints. Instead, it dramatically hones our signal to find us the best of what we want to see and leaves the door open for the real world to impact us.

As a member of the management team on a service that offers aggregation and multiple sources of a content, we often talk about how it's not a great user experience to deliver many articles in a row from a single source, or many articles in a row talking about the same event, even if it happens to be the event that is most critical for you to know. It is also not a great user experience if you feel that you are isolated, in a place where no other ideas enter and no other viewpoints get a chance to cross your screen.

The trend of personalization is a great thing - not bad at all. Every day you are self-selecting your news based on who you follow on Twitter and Facebook. Every day you are self-selecting your news based on the RSS feeds you read and the social networks you visit. This is something you are already doing. What apps like my6sense and others help to do is get you the best of what you want and free up the time you'd usually spend looking for that great stuff to go off and do something else - maybe start your own product... or even read other viewpoints where arguments are welcome.

For more on Eli's thoughts, see his interview with Time.com here: 5 Questions with Eli Pariser, Author of 'The Filter Bubble'. He is on Twitter at @elipariser, where he has personalized his news feed with 460 hand-picked people to follow.

Disclosures: I am vice president of marketing at my6sense, who delivers personalization of streams. my6sense can be assumed to be competing with multiple services in this piece, including Cadmus, Flipboard, Zite, etc.

If you still receive e-mail notifications every time a new Twitter user follows you, you might have seen a change in the messages, starting between 10 and 11 am Pacific time today. The new messages do a better job matching Twitter's new corporate color scheme and global approach, while eliminating some joint follower information common in the previous round of notices. This puts more emphasis on the individual and how they describe themselves, and reverses the social endorsement to those you already follow, more than their paying attention to you.

Until this morning, new notifications highlighted the user's avatar, biography and simple service usage stats, like total tweets, as well as the following and follower metrics. Below this, updates displayed up to three users who they follow who follow you, as well as up to three users who you both follow. The top bar was the original Twitter blue, featuring only the corporate logo and mascot.


Now, the same HTML e-mails are aligned to display in the center of the message, and the blue bar has been updated to have image from the world map behind the logo with a more muted tone in line with the new welcome page. Instead of the two practically similar folllower/following details, you get one line, showing how may users you follow who also follow your new follower. This connection actually turns the relationship on its head, as instead of caring if others follow you too, you find if your existing connections find this new person valuable - probably more useful.


In the first array of new notifications I've seen, only once has the follower shared more than 3 connections with me, but Twitter did display the number of connections (8) with three select avatars.

As before, the first action in the fine print is to report the user for abusive behavior or spam, and the second is to stop getting such notifications. If you have thus far avoided unsubscribing, the new updates are not just more pleasing to the eye, they might actually provide more signals to indicate to you if the stranger has value.

With Apple and Google doing battle for developers' hearts on in-app payments, the world of micropayments on the Web remains open for conquest, with startups vying for an opportunity to take on PayPal and Google Checkout and enable content owners to sell anything they like - from articles to documents, videos, music and photos. Last month, I highlighted Gumroad. Meanwhile, in January, an entrant called Minno, founded by a pair of former Googlers, emerged to become "spare change for the Web". Today, they announce a partnership with SoundCloud, the popular sound creatiion and sharing service, to deliver what htey call SoundRain.

SoundRain (at http://soundra.in/) empowers musicians who are already making their tracks listenable via the Web on SoundCloud to monetize, with Minno on the back-end, simply by adding embed code to their site, which adds a purchasing option to the standard SoundCloud player. In the introductory video explaining SoundRain, Minno cofounder Noah Ready-Campbell called his service "a new way to buy little stuff on the Web".

Users who want to purchase the song don't need to create a separate account with Minno. They just have to click the "buy" button next to the SoundCloud song, log in to Facebook, and the account is created. As the service is new, and looking for more users, Minno starter accounts come with $2 of credit. good for two songs on SoundRain.

Minno itself launched on TechCrunch and other blogs at the end of March as a small and simple electronic wallet. The company came up with SoundRain just over a week ago at a Music Hack Day in San Francisco, when the team integrated with SoundCloud's API.

For those artists too small or too independent for major labels, or others tired of aggressive revenue sharing from large music services, selling directly to the consumer makes a lot of sense. With SoundCloud gaining momentum and Minno looking incredibly easy to use, there's no reason you wouldn't see buy buttons popping everywhere you see SoundCloud today. And with the Web still struggling to find simple ways for premium content to live, maybe Minno is that answer. Even we dumb bloggers who give content away for free all day have got to find a good way to make a few cents on the side.