trendpreneur

“Social trendcasting”, a phrase that will almost guarantee you win that round of buzzword bingo. Edopter seems to be trying hard to capture the wisdom of crowds when it comes to trends, in a manner that basically reminds me of Hot or Not meets Likaholix.

The premise appears to be that users can sign up and then vote whether a trend is ‘in’ or ‘out’, submit their own trends, comment on trends and ‘pitch’ them (which is just a glorified soapbox style comment). You then have access to this user data by seeing whether a trend has high momentum, seeing which demographic group it’s most popular with, and looking at how much buzz it’s generated.

First thoughts: It’s trying too hard to do too much with too few. I can’t really get a handle on the user base size, but it just doesn’t seem a tremendously busy site in terms of crowd voting. There’s some great features that encourage user stickiness, such as levels and tokens (upon logging in for the first time I am called a ‘newb’, which says a lot about the user demographic). Forcing people to enter birthday and location when they sign up is instant demographic data win. But I don’t really have a clue whether something being ‘in’ on Edopter means it’s ‘in’ everywhere, or whether there’s just a specific demographic using the site in the first place.

The bits that intrigue me most are the access to historical data, the fact users can submit their own trends and thus potentially give brands and new ideas a safe sounding area, and the internet buzz tracking. Which, sad to say, appears pretty primitive (mention counting), but at least it’s a start. I guess my gut feeling is they could do a lot more with the ‘crowdsourcing’ of the internet’s voice, rather than a locked-in userbase — but looking at the potential business models, I suppose the userbase is their platform, monetising early adopters rather than the underlying technology. Plus, if they went off and did crowdsourced opinion aggregation they’d be a competitor, so I should probably shut up right about now.

It’s every CEO’s nightmare: waking up to find mails and tweets pointing out a new competitor, someone who — at first glance — appears to have pipped you to a particularly juicy post. Thus began my morning when I was alerted to Twendz, a new sentiment-based Twitter monitoring app.

However, I actually think Twendz is a good sign. To be boisterously arrogant, the app itself doesn’t hope to compete with what I’m working on in terms of technology, as it’s using the most naive of sentiment classification techniques. (OK, so it could incorporate more advanced classification, which might get worrying.) It also doesn’t really show any useful information — sure, you can get a barometer based on the last three hours or so, and there’s a jolly pretty waterfall of tweets, and the tag cloud is a nice touch, but beyond that? It’s candy, not something you can sit and digest and act on.

The fact it’s been launched by a PR firm is nothing but good, though. It’s a clear sign that at least one firm acknowledges the value of sentiment and opinions in social media, and sees a need for better ways to search and track them. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of press the app gets and it’s certainly alerted me to something that was hit home quite squarely yesterday: think small, not monolithic, release early, and see what happens. If I’d coded this up months ago, which I certainly could have done, who’d be getting the press now? Lesson learned.

In the red corner today, a startup that caused a bit of buzz at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Plista’s presentations grabbed my interest from the start, since Dominik (speaking, above) outlined the information overload problem in stylish detail. Of course, it’s a pretty big problem and there are plenty of ways to solve it — Plista focuses on the recommendations approach.

The key components seem to be collaborative filtering and use of social graphs to build up a recommendations system that works across different sites; this allows for some interesting user tracking and the creation of central information profiles that can then be tailored to different output. A really interesting idea was the preference Doppelganger, someone who likes the same stuff you like — this is something I’ve vaguely touched on in the past.

While someone might like the same things as me, so I can use their behaviour to predict my own, I’m actually quite interested in the social graphs around that person and how they resemble mine; how the influence web bends around them compared to mine; and how that person’s key information sources differ from mine (are they reading a blog I’m not?). I guess this is more meta-informational than based in product recommendations, but there’s such a huge potential for discovery here. On the other hand, we once again run into privacy issues. My preference profile is going to be very diverse, do I really want people interested in the same technologies as me told which bands I like? To what extent are we really similar? And how do the different preference dimensions interact with each other? (Maybe people who use Open Source software prefer organic, eco-friendly products. Maybe they don’t.)

But back to Plista. An engaging presentation and a product that looks interesting, especially due to its cross-domain, supra-web type nature. An information overload company worth watching, even if it isn’t solving the problem in the same way I am.

(A bit more about Plista at CNet and Crunchbase.)

Name: Siri
State: Stealth 

Siri looks to be an interesting potential competitor, primarily due to its angle on things. Firstly, it has 19 people with various impressive engineering pedigrees working on its product; secondly, it just raised $8.5m. However, this cloak-and-dagger stealth approach means nobody really knows what they’re up to. 

We can take a few guesses, though. They’re working on commercialisation activities related to CALO, a ‘personal cognitive assistant’ (think a pet robot that learns from your behaviour). TechCrunch takes this a little further by saying they’re aiming to give people who use the Internet ‘the luxury of thinking less on [their] own’. Hmmm.

It strikes me that this might well end up being something that attempts to solve the information-filtering problem I’ve talked about before, by putting together a complex model of the user’s preferences and activity, then using that to create a personalised window on the Internet. However, it could just as easily be something that figures out your most common online tasks and does them for you; maybe it can reply to form emails and leave feedback for your eBay customers without you lifting a finger! My money’s on something more like the former, though.

We won’t know more until next year, and although Siri’s reasons for secrecy are perfectly valid, surely keeping something aimed at the general Internet public under wraps for so long could cause problems — the end result might lose a lot of relevance if it’s not exposed to the world. If the technology behind it is as clever as it seems, and the implementation sound, they shouldn’t fear competitors stealing the idea; after all, the idea is only the beginning.