The DEMO 2006 producers note that 'as the library of freely available information grows, purely computational methods will fall short of finding the most reliable sources that are exactly what you want.' Several technologies have been developed in order to harness the hive mind of the community in organizing content:
Kaboodle is trying to form a shopping community. It starts out by allowing you tag and bookmark an item on a Kaboodle page - in the demo, an iPod case - and create a whole page about iPod cases. I can also go to other users' pages to see what iPod cases they have picked out as interesting. Comments can be added to the page from friends and other users. Interesting use of wiki technology.
plum.com is another social browsing service, but less focused on shopping. Users can grab, tag, and bookmark content without downloading it to their desktop. Connections are faciliated over shared interests. Heavy on the remix-mashup buzz, but still interesting. The tab-based interface looked easier to use and manage than Kaboodle's interface did.
Ofer Ben-Shachar talked about the latest launch of RawSugar - users can create, organize, and publish a hierarchical directory of recommended and tagged URLs. Hierarchical relationships and ratings feed into a relevance algorithm. This was nice and simple - not a lot of bells and whistles, more like the Google version of social search.
Riya performs both facial and text recognition upon your photos and automatically tags them. You can do this to train the search engine. This was pretty amazing - it grabbed text from name tags, recognized who was in photos on the wall in the background, etc. Interestingly, you can also access system training done by your friends and family - e.g., if my mother has already trained Riya to recognize my sister, then I don't need to do it. I can just use the initial training. You can search for people in your photos, your friends' photos, and the greater web. The public beta is in two weeks, but DEMO attendees can try it now.
TagWorld plans to compete with MySpace - basically, it's a MySpace for adults with commerce added. There's all of the blog posting and photo sharing you would expect. In addition, anyone can set up a store, and buyers can either bid or buy on the items in it. Although the company's category could be called "social commerce", the company also seems like a competitor to eBay Shops. 700,000 people have signed up in the last three months, and the company just raised funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
As a user, my favorites here were Riya and RawSugar. I enjoyed the simplicity and effectiveness of RawSugar enormously, and the Riya engine was just fascinating to see.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys demo 2006 tagworld riya technology kaboodle plum rawsugar
