link

I was travelling a bit this weekend, to my old college town of Williamstown, Massachusetts. While there I met up with many friends, most of whom asked what I like to do in my spare time. Which led to me explaining frassle, in pretty abstract terms, to a bunch of smart people that weren't all familiar with blogs.

While explaining frassle five times in a day isn't exactly continuous entertainment, it did let me get a few interesting, big-picture perspectives on frassle. Which got me thinking: where could frassle go? Dreaming big now—what ideas that are in frassle today could grow into major new kinds of tools and services? Here are a few answers.

1. The most accurately targeted advertising ever
Frassle defines shared understanding in a computable, measurable way. It can quickly give you an explanation of what one of my categories means, delivered in your own terms. It can probably be scaled to do this across multi-level social networks. To the point, frassle can give you a pretty good idea of who (among a very large network) would be interested in a particular thing, given only a small sample.

That is exactly what advertisers want to do. Given a product, they want to make the people who are likely to buy it aware of how great it is. The nature of mass media favors advertising that pushes products almost everyone needs, because the message always goes to everyone. Products that are likely to be highly useful only to a smaller group of people are therefore underserved by mass media advertising. Google knows this and delivers a higher clickthrough rate on ads hosted through their AdWords program because they keep track of how successful different ads are on different websites.

Frassle's inter-category mappings would simply be another way to track the same kind of correlations. Since frassle delivers a publishing and authoring interface to individual users, not just to website with a box on the right for ads, you could even target ads based on data about the viewer herself, rather than the particular website she is currently viewing.

Could it work as well as Google's AdWords? Could it work better?

2. A personalized search engine

Is anyone else doing this? Some related ventures are under way from Technorati, Amazon.com and A9, and certainly others. How do I find them?

link

A rollup is an automated blog that aggregates (rolls up) a number of different sources. Using RSS feeds you can create your own rollup for any topic.

link

Clay Shirky lists some link managers. There are some impressive offerings in this mix.

link

The New York times has a Circuits piece on Amplify, a tool that lets you easily combine stuff from multiple websites on a single page. So you can create a tiled view of different wallpaper and furniture patterns, or combine info from several sites on the same topic. Here's an example.

Sounds like blogging, eh? Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel, and Rafat Ali deride it as a weak attempt to do blogging in a proprietary format. I guess they're right. But to the extent that Amplify is useful or successful, what can we learn from it? What can we learn from it suckage?

First the successes—or anticipated successes. The frames design is horrid for most things, like the Bushisms example linked above, but it is good for some things. Sometime you want to compare things side-by-side. Doing this with frames might work for some people.

Getting in the New York Times is good. Perhaps it's paid placement, but in any case it is a good way to reach out to thousands of people likely to be interested in a high-tech product.

Now the suckage. Frames-based design is usually bad. People are good at using scrollbars. The site has some classic design flaws, but the chief problem is that there are lots of links with vague feel-good titles that nobody will ever click on. Consider the seven things in the HUGE Amplify bar at the top of each amp page, from left to right:

1. Cone-shaped doohickey. Turns out this just goes to Amplify homepage, as does the huge logo on the right. It almost looks like some sort of magical control widget that allows you to set the volume, but that metaphor makes no sense here.
2. Back button. BACK button? What the fuck? It's just like the back button in my browser except it's in the wrong place and doesn't work.
3. "What is Amplify?". Another link to the homepage. Brilliant!
4. "Get Amplify". Download for MSIE/Windows. The most straightforward item of the bunch, though not something you'd click more than once.
5. "Amplify Community". Links to a collection of hierarchically categorized pages by other amp users. This is a reasonable features, but if it said "see 5 other amps about animals having sex" instead of something totally generic maybe people could be interested enough to click on it. Comment links on every fragment of an amp page would be better.
6. "Share this amp". Send a link via email. Useful enough, but why not just say "email this amp"?
7. Huge amplify logo. Goes to, shockingly, the home page.

Oh, and I found out what the back button does. It takes you to the previous amp you were at. Rather than just letting your browser's back button work, it introduces a puzzling UI behavior by opening any amps on top of each other in the same window. If you use your browser's back button, it goes to some intermediate page momentarily and then forwards you to the page you were just viewing. Lame.

Well, I guess I turned from taking an optimistic look at Amplify to ragging on it hard Jarvis-style. Sorry Amplify, but maybe these suggestions can help you improve your interface. I'll leave you with some wisdom from Strongbad, whose love for scrolling could serve as a good lesson for the frames-addicted amplify developers.

Every day you come a-scrollin' back, scroll buttons gettin' ill like a heart-attack. Uh!

link

AmphetaRate is a centralized ratings/recommendation service that provides personalized news and blog recommendations through a news aggregator interface. Using compatible aggregators, you can rate articles found in your subscribed feeds to discover articles and feeds that suit your taste, thus filling your news addiction.

link

Click on articles that interest you. Then come back to Findory Blogory. We'll find other weblogs articles for you and build you a personalized front page!

Customized RSS feeds. Coolness.

link

MyStack.com lets you create "Stacks" - like the one you see on the right-hand side of the page. A stack is a list of links, like a blogroll, and can be inserted into a weblog or webpage. Unlike ordinary blogrolls, the list of links in a Stack changes. When you create a stack, you tell us what items you want us to stack for you. When the PubSub system finds new items that match your request, your Stack is immediately updated.

link

login: admin, password: demo

link

Free software Bliki implementation. Looks good.

Also on that site:

• Why "another" Blog and Wiki?
• Link to Martin Fowler's thoughts on Blikis
• Link to Wikipedia's definition & list of Blikis