I love RSS, I love IM and I love the concept of Attention Data. Wrap it all up together and put a just-in-time bow on top and what do you get? The Touchstone Attention Management Engine. I love it.
A product of Australia’s Faraday Media, founded by Chris Saad and Ashley Angell, Touchstone is currently in private alpha with a few hundred invites going out per month. There’s a new batch available now, but note that it’s for Windows only.
The company is announcing today a first round of funding and though it’s declined to provide any details on that funding Saad tells me it will mean a major ramping up of development. To be honest I was skeptical until he and I chatted about just what Touchstone does. Even prior to hearing about the funding, I’d visited the site months ago and left with no idea what was going on. I’m real glad I figured it out, because Touchstone is the coolest thing I’ve seen in quite awhile.
Here’s what it is: It’s a desktop app that integrates several sources of incoming information, runs them all through a set of filters that you administer and then notifies you automatically when important events have occurred. That notification will come in a variety of ways, depending on how important the event is relative to your prioritized filters.
What does that mean? It means you can set Touchstone to pull in RSS and atom feeds, POP emails and Gmail, filter the incoming items for keywords you’ve set to varying priority levels with sliders and tell the system how you’d like to be notified of events of different levels of importance.
Saad tells me it’s a little more complicated than just keywords, the filters also incorporate each item’s declared importance, the popularity of the item on the net and the item’s age. Sounds smart, though the proof will be in the pudding of long term use.
If you chose to have it do so, the desktop app can also scan the contents of your computer and recommend keywords based on your past work. They call that Intuitive Attention Management. That data is all saved locally never sent away from your computer.
Notification of new events comes in three forms: system tray alerts (toast), a news-ticker style bar and a cursor trail that floats behind your cursor for a few seconds when something you’ve predetermined is really important occurs.
Imagine seeing a cursor trail whenever an especially important email just came into your inbox, an important new task is assigned to you in Basecamp or your topic of interest is being debated on the front page of Digg. Cursor trail…what’s up?
It’s just feeds and email for now, but the company is holding a contest for developers to create new input and output adapters for the system, Saad says 50 developers have signed up so far. Here’s a number of ideas to inspire future functionality.
Business model? When it goes public you’ll be able to use this awesome service for free with some particularly contextual ads around it or pay to get an ad-free version.
This is the kind of tool that I can imagine becoming core to my workflow once there’s a Mac version. If this little dream called Touchstone comes true, it’s going between NetNewsWire and Adium on my desktop. It’s a tool for smart, personalized and persistent awareness of the information ecosystem.
Updated: See also Attensa, which I totally meant to include here at first and I just forgot. Sorry Attensa folks!
“Saad tells me it’s a little more complicated than just keywords, the filters also incorporate each item’s declared importance, the popularity of the item on the net and the item’s age. Sounds smart, though the proof will be in the pudding of long term use.”
having to say “ok, when there’s a ‘microsoft article with priority 4, that’s less than 2 days old, then show a cursor trail, but if its 4 days old, then show a ‘toast’…” i don’t want to set something like that up for the 15 different topics/companies i’m interested in. let alone having to tweak these settings all the time after being annoyed at the 5000 “Vista delayed again!” messages i’d get trailing my cursor every week.
that actually sounds a little too complicated for me… I’d rather have an rss reader that created those filters automatically as it learned from which stories i click on.
Oh just you wait, buddy, for the next company I’m writing up right now then. In the mean time, check out Attensa.
Attensa looks much more along the lines of what i’m after, but sadly it’s for Outlook (which i hate) and client side. I much much prefer web based apps to desktop apps if i can help it. (and free also helps!
hopefully your pending company review will pull through for me
Sounds really powerful, but they will really have to make it easy to use for the average user with simple wizards and the like (but still allowing “power users” to access all of the features). It should be interesting to see what the other designers are inspired to add on.
Hi Adam,
Just to clarify a bit, Touchstone will actually do exactly what you want in terms of auto-detecting your interests and auto-tuning itself as you use it (and use your whole computer actually).
The manual sliders you see in the article are overrides/manual controls that help influence the process.
If the tuning system has a great heuristic method of learning what I like with minimal input on my side, then I’m all for it, but for now, I’ll stick with Growl on the mac
Wow, that sounds like good technology. I agree the simple interface is going to be critical.
Can they configure this to spider out information on the web? Like I tell it i’m interested in cetain TV bittorrent shows, telecom industry news, PHP tutorials, etc. and it spiders out for me and notifies me when it has a ‘report’ ready for me to review?
http://www.telecommer.com
Alex – It does just that – I am also a big fan of Growl btw – very nice work
Telecom – At the moment we are focusing on filtering incoming information from other applications rather than finding you new content to see. However our personal attention profile that we generate (called IAM) will be an open, documented format in XML that others might choose to consume and create spiders for – and then display the result in Touchstone alerts
I don’t think prioritising the way a feed’s alert appears to you based on the keywords it’s got (or even how popular the post is on the net), is a good idea.
1. Duplicate content. A lot of feeds cover the same topic. If I read it once, I don’t want to keep seeing it repeatedly because of a keyword match.
2. Managing all this is a pain. As if Outlook’s options configuration was not complex enough, keeping to constantly update my “filters” so that an article doesn’t / does pop up, just adds to the pain.
3. I’d rather use a completely online aggregator (but I’m more of a casual reader than a news hound), that way, when I *want* to read the news/blogs, I can *go* there, rather than have this local client continuously bug me with new information.
4. When you don’t want to read a post, you can “skip” it and move on. That’s what I do, at any rate. I get around 90+ odd posts from the choiciest blogs everyday (Techcrunch is one, of course) and going through the new ones, manually, is a pleasure, while manually configuring the keyword settings for priority flagging, alerting would definitely be a pain.
It seems very cool… but does anyone have an invite?
Dhiraj: interesting points you raise.
1. From what I’ve understood the Touchstone algorithm goes beyond plain keyword matching.
2. The program auto-detects your interests. The manual overrides you see in the screenshot are optional.
3. Usually I start my day in my preferred feed reader too, but I do like to receive complementing notifications during the rest of my day, especially on topics I specialize in (of which desktop alert systems happen to be one).
4. Interests may be volatile, correct. Subscribing is one thing, getting rid of notifications is another
If Chris is listening: how easy is it for Touchstone users to dismiss a certain type of information feed from now on?
This looks very interesting. I just signed up for their newsletter and learned that for each alfa tester they give out 5 “for your friends” invitations… does anyone still have one of those ? I’ll repay you with 10 of the best beers in the world when you’re over in Belgium one of these
Thanks.
Hi Guys,
I have been lucky enough to get a sneak peek at Touchstone (gotta love the invite system!!) and so far it is unreal!! I suscribe to a heap of RSS feeds from various locations, and find it effective in terms of only notifying me of what I want!! I can’t wait to see what they do next (and I hear there is heaps more in the pipeline too).
Phillippe, I have 2 invites left if you would like one let me know (and then we can begin to pass this around the web!
P.S I will be expecting those beers!
Tygh, mind passing one of those invites my way? dotcomlarry [at] gmail
And just so I don’t sound like a beggar, touchstone does look interesting, and i’m rather curious as to how it will be able to ‘learn’ my habits and interests.
Hi Marjolein
As you suggested the screenshot shows a screen where the user can manually set some preferences that influence the overall/auto-detected profile touchstone builds by itself. So by using those overrides users can set a few keywords and maybe even entire sources to a ‘negative importance’ to diminish their impact on your day.
I hope this answers the question!
I love PointCast!
Any time you require the user (consumer) to do anything at all, a huge hurdle is created, as in, “Yeah, this might be really cool, but will I be interested in spending time with it in a few weeks after the novelty has worn off and the next cool thing has arrived?”
However, if the Touchstone application is truly a “thinking” system with built-in AI and can create its own content filters based on observing keystrokes/site visits/tagging/email content/RSS feeds/preferences/etc., it addresses a legitimate need in the market to manage information overload. I could even see my folks getting excited about that, which = scalability
Looking forward to receiving an invite Chris!
I would really appreciate an invite from anyone who could pass one on.
It’s like gmail all over again
danielbower at gmail dot com
Cheers in advance
“Fisrt Attention Management Engine” …ummm, I don’t think so. But, it looks kinda cool though.
“Information overload” is indeed a problem and has been our focus at Attensa for some time now. As our name implies, our “attention engine” is the core of our IP. We clearly have a different approach than touchstone from a business model perspective, but we agree with muc of the “manifesto.”
Attensa has invested literally millions over the past several years on our attention engine technologies, with some work dating back to 2000. While we agree on the requirement of client side attention engines (like the one that communicates with and is in Attensa for Outlook) we believe it is equally important that this capability be buttressed with a massively scalable server side infrastructure to glean the same attention benefits for the community at large (or affinity groups) for intelligent priortization and recommendation. Doing this with very large amounts of transient meta data – in real time – is very, very complex. And, we beleive, very very useful.
Incidentally, RSS just happens to be the first data type we are utilizing to enable our customers to cut down on information overload. The “first attention management engine” was shipped a long time ago – by Attensa. We didnt say anything for a while but did unveil the existence of the technology at Gnomedex in summer 2005 surrounding our “attentionstream” technology. It handles syncing for us but in the background it is monitoring literally hundreds of detailed behaviorial characteristics and btw clickstreams are hardly the most interesting or useful mecahnism for deriving attention value. For ad targeting, MAYBE, for attention, no.
In any event, welcome to the show Touchstone, we’ve been carrying this bag solo for some time now.
Hi Larry,
on one condition though 
, would you be able to give one of yours to Daniel Blower? Let’s share this thing around!
I sent you my second last invite!
Have fun playing with it!!
Hi,
Im wondering about the privacy and transparency of the data gathered through this device? Yes, this device scans your computer and monitors your data to “attention manage your email and rss” but does this transmit this data back to a central repository? Does the service monitor a users incoming and outgoing links and track this data? Do you then intend to resell this data for tracking purposes?
Tom
Anyone have an invite left for me?…would greatly appreciate it…eric at koove dot com.
no news today?
This does look really cool, I’d love to get a hold of an invite as well, if anyone has an extra (christopherdwhite@gmail.com).
Hi Craig,
Thanks for welcoming us. Do you think we should have a big public feud to generate some buzz?
I agree that it is time that more companies took attention management more seriously. People underestimate the lost productivity and growing attention deficit problem. Of course the client-side is the best place to do a lot of the work.
I think Attensa and Touchstone have a great opportunity to both collaborate and compete in the space. Over time however, I think it will become clear that our products are quite different in approach and I hope we can find some good ways to complement each other.
Tom,
The data that Touchstone collects (after your explicit permission and only if you choose – the app will actually work even if you turn off the self-tuning technology) is stored in a human readable XML file we are calling your IAM Profile. The format of this file will be published for all to see and use. We will even open up the spec for discussion if anyone has any great ideas to add in.
It is not sent anywhere to any servers.
I’m also after an invite if any are left. patrick at justanothermobilemonday.com. Thanks …
Though it may be cool to some, its really nothing new, algos like these have been around since web 1.0… best way to overcome info overload is to use the good ‘ole discernment and sound judgement and get into the habit of asking yourself do i really need another subscription, feed etc, the answer is most likely a big fat NO, done deal and you’ll sleep better at night…
Put me in for an invite! Seriously, if anyone has an extra let me know! I am going to subscribe to the feed here and visit back often.
Yes Touchstone and Attensa should collaborate and we are no doubt on the same side. No feuds required. Cool stuff you are exposing we are anxious to learn more. incidentally, Attensa 1.5 is client side only wrt to attention data and uses attentionstream to sync but there is no identifiable data.
sounds really interesting to me! If anyone has an invite to share, I would be glad.
FlorianZrenner (at) gmail.com
I would really appreciate an invite from anyone who could pass one on!
guphex at gmail dot com
Cheers in advance
I think any companies or bloggers that use the phrase “attention data” or, frankly, “attention [anything]” need to be punished. Locked in a closet with Vanna White or have their nostrils stuck together with krazy glue or something similarly lyrical.
Then again, I also think the phrase “Web 2.0″ is horrendously obnoxious and useless. So why do I visit this site? I occasionally discover interesting products and services. DabbleDB, for instance, is darn cool. But I just need to hold my nose when slogging through the meaningless jargon sometimes
Or maybe I should just withhold my attention stream? Ow… $*#(0 ouch… oohhhhhwww! thrggntnnttt
Tone,
I think the beauty about Touchstone is that you can sign up to another subscription and only get the feeds you want. So if you are tempting to sign up to another RSS subscription you can, knowing that you won’t be burdened with lots of feeds.
Another thing I’ve picked up on, from Touchstone’s blog, is that RSS subscriptions are only the start of it. Developers are working on input adapters at the moment for emails, ebay auctions, stocks and other various types of data sources. I’m looking forward to the stock input adapter myself to alert me whenever there is a change in the prices of “my” shares.
I’m another one interested in an invite, so if anyone out there still has one, know that you will be helping a student out: vandenboogar at wisc dot edu
Thanks!
This sounds like a fantastic idea, and the more information we’re flooded with, the more we’re going to need something like this software. Even with RSS feeds, it’s getting more and more difficult to manage all the information out there, and I find myself blowing way too much time reading and not enough time actually acting on new information.
So, anyone have invites left? Like the rest of you, I’m dying to try this out already.
asurroca at hotmail dot com
Hi. If anybody still has an invite left, I’d love to get hold of one:
dliebke at gmail dot com
This sounds like a fantastic piece of software and I’m keen to play with it. This is definitely a huge area for the future.
There are a bunch of invites being handed out by the community at http://communit.../ShowForum.aspx
jonny383
anybody have invites left? please do send me one.. firstname at gmail
anybody have invites left? please do send me one.. firstname at gmail