Let's Build Something

Maria Popova once joked that it seemed as though we'd "reached a cultural point at which every time someone uses the word 'curation' in reference to content and publishing, an actual museum curator kills a kitten". Yet it does seem that curation is becoming more important than ever, and that the growing surfeit of content means that the people and tools that help us get to the good stuff quicker and easier are more useful than ever. The challenge is how we do that. For every individual there is a different view on what defines 'good', and that in itself shifts according to context. My own opinion is that combinations of different types of content curation (the three pillars being professional, algorithmic, and social) work best to get us to that place. 

One of the (many) great things about Twitter is that it's such an excellent source of great links and content. But most of us don't have the luxury of sitting on Twitter all day so it's easy to miss the good stuff. Having something that showed me the most interesting links and updates that have been shared whilst I've been away (or shared by people I follow in different time zones) would be wonderfully useful. Lots of people have had a go at this. Twitter itself has it's Discover tab and the 'Tweets for you'. Kottke created Stellar. There's aggregators like Paper.li. I'm sure all of these have their place and inevitably we will use more than one tool, but there is nothing that quite nails it for me. The closest is probably Percolate but that has since pivoted to become a business tool (and seemingly an excellent one at that).

Wouldn't it be fun to have a go at building something to tackle this problem? I was talking to James Haycock who runs Adaptive Lab about this and he thought so too, so we're going to do just that. I'm rather happy to be partnering with Adpative Lab - they are a 'skunkworks for hire', a very smart group of creative technologists, developers and data specialists that collaborate with companies large and small (including ASOS and YouGov) to create innovative new products and services (check them out). It occurred to both James and I that a service such as this would be useful for the readers of this blog so we thought we'd make the process of building it as open as possible, and involve you in helping to shape something that you could then go on to use. It will make the process fun and really interesting, and I was a fan of the way in which MadeByMany blogged the development process of the Picle app. So I'll be blogging updates as we go, and asking for feedback that can help us to create something that is as useful as possible for everyone. I'll also be including updates on my weekly email, so if you want to make sure you don't miss out you can sign up here.

I'm rather excited to see what we might build together. So far, we have a working project title - Fraggl (nothing to do with these definitions of 'Fraggle'), and have defined the problem we are trying to solve thus:

It's impossible to be on Twitter 24 hours a day. Most of us dip in and out when we have a spare few minutes. So how can I make sure that I don't miss out on the great content shared by the people I follow? I want a way to regularly see the most useful, interesting, stimulating, original and links that have been shared amongst the people I like on Twitter. And I'd like those links to be as relevant as possible to my interests.  No existing service does this well enough for me.

A one-sentence elevator pitch is: The service that ensures you never miss the most useful content shared by people who are interested in the same things you are.

We have a few ideas as to how we propose to do this which we'll share, but for now, what we'd really like to know is this:

As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Image courtesy

Comments

[Antony Mayfield]

Best of luck with the project, Neil - sounds really interesting.

I used to think of Summify as my Twitter safety net. I could happily ignore Twitter for a day and focus on some taks that demanded deep thought and effort and know what had happened while I was away from the stream.

Once Twitter acquired it, that service faded away - certainly the mails from Twitter are nowhere near as useful.

I know you will be looking at all sorts of interesting other ways of looking at this, but just recreating Summify would be a wonderful thing.

It is definitely worth exploring - Percolate et al have all come close, but somehow no one's created a filter that makes you go "wow". It's still labour intensive stuff, finding the good stuff amidst the nonsense.

[Asp]

Neil! I was discussing the same problem with a friend, how I only manage to get a snapshot of the hyper-stream that twitter is. Maybe it's a fundamental design flaw that twitter needs to work on. Or maybe it's a larger problem, that of one man trying to catch up on the bigger, faster information juggernaut that the web (on the whole) is. The juggernaut will keep getting bigger, faster. Maybe there is a need for 'less'. Creating human-sized lenses that keep things to manageable minimum, and not drown us, like Twitter does.

[Olivier]

One sentence elevator pitch: An Edgerank for Twitter

[Rayna]

Sounds like a fantastic project. I used to use Google Reader to track my favourite 'tweeters' but we know how that worked out. I look forward to following and supporting your progress.

[Andy Cowles]

What a good idea!

[Jeremy Hill]

Sounds like a great idea

[eaon]

good idea. in theory the 'lists' function in twitter was supposed to help this but it doesn't seem to provide the RE-tweets of the people in the list, only the 'authored' tweets. And of course it's the stuff that the people on the list are 'pointing to' that is often the most interesting.
Hope I've understood what you're up to.
Eaon

[Dan Thornton]

Best of luck, Sir. I still use Percolate as an email summary, along with your own good email newsletter, but I've increasingly been looking at the potential to build some tools to make my life easier and to help others in the process, so it seems you're a bit more advanced along the same lines.

The loss of Google Reader, Twitter exerting more control etc means there are definitely opportunities out there.

Interested in Fraggl, although the Mailchimp signup just failed when I tried it :(

[jamie pither]

This service is much needed, I'd definitely want you to build it.

Not sure what Twitter's API would allow though... don't know if you'd want to be able to rank all the people you follow first, or place specific usernames you prioritise into a system, then rates their most prolific content from the day.

Or if you wanted to rank content only, as people you're not close to may also be involved in sharing awesome content that you don't want to miss out on....

Depends which way you want to look at it, but I presume you would follow people because you found them interesting in the first place... hmm

[Wessel van Rensburg]

Hi guys, we at RAAK built just such an app for The Mirror Group (Google unmissab.ly).

We have now taken what we built and rebuilt it from the ground up, with an entirely different approach to curating. We'd happily share what we learned or give advice.