Attention management ticker Particls from Faraday Media moves from private testing to a full public beta launch today.
Particls is an alerts platform that conveys attention data. Particls evaluates incoming information and ranks it based on “Personal Relevance”. Particls then uses an “Output Adapter” that provides only the amount of attention required for the relevancy of the alert based on a policy of “Diminishing Attention Consumption”.
In layman’s terms, Particls displays news it thinks a user will be interested in based on history, feeds and a list of keywords. Think a smart RSS reader that scrolls on your screen.
Setting Particls up is fairly straight forward. Buttons are immediately integrated at a browser level and adding feeds, keywords and filters is simple. Customization options are extensive but are not for the non-geek inclined; there’s too many options and it’s raw data driven, no user friendly WYSIWIG color charts or sizing options.
The results are exactly as promised. Items of interest are scrolled based on your attention preferences, and the ability to tweak priority allows for extensive filtering that delivers relevant and topical news.
Particls offers free API access to developers and publishers are able to customize Particls with co-branding and site specific data. For those interested in trying Particls a TechCrunch flavored version is available for download here, Windows only at this stage though a Mac version is planned.
Whilst the technology behind Particls alone should make for a compelling service, the format is not going to be for everyone. Tickers are a love them/ hate them thing with little middle ground. For those on the love side of the ticker debate, Particls may well become a must have for the desktop.
Me, hate ‘em. I installed Particls – what a waste of time. Sure, maybe I do need a smart ticker. Maybe I can just use my brain and an RSS reader and not have that dumb ticker across the top of my screen.
I really do like Particls… except for the fact that it uses over 300MB bandwidth every day just to operate. Hopefully they fix this major flaw:
http://www.tang...556/topic/11740
wtf ?
a scrolling ticker rss reader that filters what it shows ?
my god, did you really fall for the fancy sounding “Diminishing Attention Consumption” line ?
hehe way to pass on the TechCrunch branding!
Hi Duncan – thanks for the post. Just to clarify the news ticker is just the first, most obvious way you can get your news with Particls.
Another example is Pop-up alerts for the most important/personally relevant news and it can also generate a filtered RSS feed for use in other readers and widgets.
Also, new adapters will be coming out all the time so you can mix and match – turn some on and turn others off. Other developers can also contribute with the open Adapter architecture.
My friend/fellow blogger Huw Leslie from Gizbuzz interviewed Chris Saad from Particls for the Gizbuzz Podcast (happened to coincide with the launch of the Particls public beta).
http://gizbuzz....-from-particls/
Why they hate scrolling ticker thing. It’s annoying, hard to read, and miss the spot. Half of American workforce to construction workers can’t read. I’m damn serious. They only knew few words other than physical.
Wow…anything that requires so many obscure words in sequence to describe is going to have a hard time pulling users in. I read the title of the post at least 10 times – and I’m still not sure if it’s a typo or just an odd arrangement of words that was meant to make sense. Maybe it’s the 3 nouns…not sure. I need to rest my brain.
Oh wait, stop the presses, they will also have “pop up” option in the near future. Man, you can’t make this stuff up. We have a scrolling ticker in 2007 in beta ! and a pop up option planned for the future.
I hope they don’t take on too much technology at once.
I tried particls for a few weeks and was deeply unimpressed. First off it couldn’t cope with a web proxy, second, for all its much vaunted configurability I couldn;t find anyway to make ti stop giving me utterly irrelevant nonsense that I was not even remotely interested in (and the ticker was really annoying) and then a new release came and somehow it borke itself and I never bothered to try and find out why.
Google can kick people out for violating TOS. hehehhehe
Been using it since the beginning in June 2006 and it just gets better and better with each new version. I am definitely on the love side of the ticker debate and at this point couldn’t live without it….I can keep an eye on exactly what I want to, which an RSS reader really cannot.
Particls rocks!
Seems like a pretty nifty tool for individuals in your line of business. I find the constant ticker somewhat distracting from what I’m actually supposed to be doing.
blah, a red aston martin.
a porsche 911 997 turbo is superior, followed by an f430 ferrari
#2 Brandon – Serious about 300MB each day? Haven’t had a chance to check it out myself.
I started downloading – then it was taking long (I let it continue)… I started reading the comments and I canceled it
Lame. The filtering looks like cheap keyword matching, as posts that match the criteria (e.g. politics) but don’t contain the keyword fail to come through.
What a useless service. How many people know how to modify all those HTML properties (watch the demo videos to see what I mean)? As if I’m not distracted by nonsense enough already, the last thing I need is more useless popups. Personally, I want news when I start my RSS reader, not at random times during the day.
PS: They also “stole” Radiohead music in their promo videos. Not cool
(((
PPS: Windows only download?! Yuck.
The thing about these services is that they have some great ideas, but it’d just be a lot better to have them integrate into the Google Personalized page, NetVibes, or stuff we already use..
Sounded good until I read the comments. TechCrunch readers sure are a bunch of ruthless technophiles and I appreciate that!
I’ve been part of the invite only beta for about 2 months now (no connection to the company at all)… and its become a very important part of my online existence…. I’m CEO of a small software firm (still pre announcement) and without it I could not possibly be on top of everything I need to keep up with in our target space (to the extent I am I owe it to Particls!)…. it is more than just a filter, it is more than just an RSS (I’ve tried more than I can count and find that now rather than going to back the two I used most, feedDemon and Google Reader, I rely on the “pebbles’ feed from particls.
Note that I thought originally that I would use the faclitiies of Particls in this order 1) Pop-ups 2) Pebbles (RSS feed) 3) Ticker…. (I’ve cast out every other ticker that I’ve put on my desktop) but I find i had it exactly backwards! Use has shown me that Ticker and Pebbles are the two I use (in that order) and the pop-up the least… but the glory of it is the pop up can show only the MOST important items to me… personal attention where its needed…
If you have time to read everything and anything – go for it. If you have to be selective with your time and attention …. Particls is just about the best tool I can imagine (and I’ve been testing and using ‘push’ and’pull’ online resources for some 20 years or more) it finds things I would not find otherwise, and limits the flow to one I can handle …. what more could I ask.
I agree…I lose my attention just trying to figure out exactly what they do….I think this is for the A.D.D..
Anyway, RSS tickers have been around for years…just google search “RSS Tickers” and you will get your particles.
I tried Particls a couple of weeks ago and that seems to be really annoying offering me completely irrelevant information.
I use NewsBliss (http://www.newsbliss.com) for about half a year and it does exactly what real RSS streamer should do: scrolls feeds I subscribed to, without all that extra BS (so called ‘relevance’). Moreover, it displays media and plays podcasts.
Why is it commentators on techcrunch love to whine? Is it some frustrated geek thing? Why don’t you try the thing for a week, and then have an opinion – rather than a 30 second grab you got from some screenshot. The attention engine in Particls requires time to build up – a day is not enough for it to build a profile of you.
I am not a fan of tickers because of the distraction when I am working at my day job, and I don’t enable the pop-ups for a similar reason – but I have found it extremely useful to having it “pull” content on my research interests when I am READY to be distracted.
The big innovation is the attention engine – yes, it pulls key words, but if you look at the APML file stored on your hard disk (I don’t see google giving me access to the information they collect about me…), you can see it how scores various subjects, further refining your preferred content. In other words, with time it gets better. I can attest to this, because I recently had a fresh installation with a new APML file storing my data, and I am finding the results to be not as special anymore…it takes time for it to profile you properly.
I really think this techcrunch article did a disservice to what makes Particls so great – it’s basically a copy and paste of some one liners from the press release, and where there is some original thought, it is focussing on the wrong things. Yes the format is not for everyone, but why haven’t you looked into the attention engine? You can just as easily reapply the “output” in an RSS reader, with the attention engine determining what you should read.
Go and try it!
(I am just a satisfied user, nothing else)
i used to love pointcast
I like the desktop wall paper
“Why is it commentators on techcrunch love to whine? Is it some frustrated geek thing?”
No, we are just good at cutting through PR bullcrap. I think TC should hire some of the more cynical posters here so they’re not posting useless crap all the time.
Anyone who went through dot com will realize that this was done before and companies that offered stuff like this failed miserably. Heck, this stuff was tried over 15 years ago, numerous times and all of them have failed. It’s not like TC editors had to search for some obscure dot com company to find a predecessor:
http://en.wikip...wiki/PointCast_(dotcom)
Seriously, can TC please hire someone who went trough dot com so they can weed out nonsense a bit better?
I’ve been a beta tester for this since May of 2006 (back when it was still named Touchstone). It’s been an interesting development to be part of, but honestly I still find it flawed.
It is a great idea, and when it works correctly it works wonderfully. However, many of my issues are little annoyances that definitely add up. For example, upon reinstall most of your personalized settings are overwritten (not your feeds, just your settings). I’ve reported this “bug” several times to the point that I gave up trying because it seemed Chris really did not care. Also, on a similar note, the news ticker still reserves the screen space even after you’ve unchecked the “always on top” option. Any window will still open up compensating for the ticker’s screen real estate. Again, not a huge issue, but something that I have reported probably 6 different times to Chris and was promptly ignored. Not to mention the ridiculous waste of space for the branding. Literally, the Particls logo takes up a good 1/5 of the news ticker. I understand the need for brand identity, but someone needs a serious lesson in user experience and user interface design.
I am not affiliated with Particls, I am just a VERY long time tester for them. I’d suggest people give it a shot before they jump to any uneducated assumptions.
Very quick updates. I just downloaded this newest build, and
1. it remembered my personalized settings (finally).
2. The problem with reserving the screen space even when not set to “always on top” seems to be fixed, however…the stealing focus even when the ticker is below other windows still occurs, and is still VERY annoying.
3. The Particls icon can be changed to something a bit smaller (like 1/4 the size) if you go into the advanced options for the ticker. So, the logo is too big, but it is “fixable”.
Why does the domain have to be “particls”? Who the hell can remember that many names omitting letters? “Flickr” is enough! Please use some whole english words for your domain. Buy one if you believe you are on top of something big. I’m sick of these lame domains regardless of what they are doing. And BTW, I still don’t get it why we need the IT stuff.
PS: the title of this post sucks. Michael, hire someone who can write!
This is without doubt the lamest review I have seen come out of TechCrunch, followed promptly by the saddest set of coat-tailers I’ve ever seen, having a whinge because they can’t understand a couple of concepts. How many of you, and I include the author here, have actually downloaded and tried Particls?
Yes, Particls includes a ticker. That’s great. Get over it. What about the ideas you simply regurgitated as quotes – “Particls offers free API access to developers”, “publishers are able to customize Particls with co-branding and site specific data”, and what about the key concepts you didn’t bother explaining such as “Personal Relevance” and “Output Adapter”? Didn’t get it? Couldn’t explain it? Or, just couldn’t be bothered? Either way it’s this sort of regurgitation badged as intelligent review that I hope Particls or an equivalent will soon filter out.
I’ve been a loyal follower of TechCrunch for a hell of a long time, but this disappoints me. This isn’t journalism. It isn’t even opinion. It is simply the handing back of a couple of press releases with a TechCrunch logo on them, and a few things taken out so that the focus becomes the ticker.
What about the fact that, as Chris explains later in comments, that Particls can be used as “a filtered RSS feed for use in other readers and widgets” (very neat usable idea by the way), or that the ticker is one of 3 delivery mechanisms provided as standard. What are “Pebbles”? Do you know?
This is fresh development, a new idea based upon existing ideas, but implemented in a new way and made better by it. OK, so it’s not a VOIP service, it’s not a Facebook/MySpace/YouTube/Flickr/Digg plugin or clone, it isn’t one of the many startups being courted by Google and it is based upon Web 1.0 ideas, but so what? Examine the idea based upon it’s own merits.
I hope to see better reporting next time I come back to TechCrunch, and I’m not sure I’ll even bother reading the comments from the followbots.
Out of 30 comments, I counted 2 that contained any kind of relevant informed criticism, the 2 referring to bandwidth and platform requirements.
btw. A quick subset of the above comments demonstrate a real lowering of the collective contributer intelligence. I hope this is only cursory and that it is not the result of a lowering of TechCrunch standards, and a subseqent drop in quality…
eg.
“Why does the domain have to be “particls”?”… Does not require comment
“anything that requires so many obscure words in sequence to describe is going to have a hard time pulling users in”… Because these were obviously the words used by Particls and not the words used to title a TechCrunch post hey???
“we are just good at cutting through PR bullcrap”… How? What do you think this writeup was? Have you downloaded Particls? And if not what makes you such an informed source? Or do you simply have that special sense?
Come on guys…
I have read with interest the comments above and I have must admit, sadly, I do agree with Richard. Most of the negative comments lack any real analytical bent, seeming to be empty words for the sake of getting a comment up on Techcrunch. A bit like talking to hear your own voice. Mark G’s comment in particular is remarkably ignorant. To suggest Particls is just an RSS ticker (just google search “RSS Tickers” and you will get your particles) is to reveal a complete lack of understanding about how the attention engine works.
Moreover, none of the comments posted says the ticker can be turned off. Particls will continue to do it’s job in the background and still deliver pop-up alerts or route the news to an appropriate place when important material is found.
Wow a real Bovril moment going on here. i.e you either love it or hate it. I have been using Particls (Touchstone) for sometime now and taken the time to understand the underlying technology and direction of this service; it is worth looking at closely. [Note: I do not work for or advise this company]
The core concept is based around trying to solve the “information overload” problem we all face today by collating our Attention Metadata and structuring it into an open exchangeable format APML in order to ultimately develop a personal discovery engine.
Today that discovery is exposed as a ticker but it is only one of several ways to view the Particls attention stream.
Like Particls there are many other “LifeStream” services – http://lifestreamblog.com/ –
Twitter, Jaiku, Plazes, Dandelife, Last.FM, Wakoopa, etc. All looking to capture and combine our different forms of attention metadata into some usable format in order to return us ‘discovery’ value. e.g Last.FM tracks my musical taste and returns that attention back to me as new music discovery and concerts.
The bottom-line is that Particls is a self-funded (pre-series A) company looking to develop a new and different discovery concept to overcome the information overload problem. Have they got it perfect, probably not given some of the comments but that is why they have gone into a public beta to get honest feedback.
I know Particls are working on other means of attention capture other than keywords in order to start building our attention profile. One option under consideration is to use application plugins, so that we can choose which applications we want to record our attention. Much like Last.FM’s audioscrobbler for Windows Media Player/iTunes but on a wider scale e.g to include Flickr, Delicious, Firefox etc.
Ultimately it is about combining our identity, presence, attention, location and semantics (iPALS) in order to exchange it with a trusted online broker who will exchange our personal information for some value.
Ermm, haven’t tried it, don’t want to get flamed for asking a simple question, but the techcrunch screenshot – google desktop widgets on the left, but what’s that on the bottom in place of the taskbar? (I’m using XP, maybe that’s just how Vista looks.) Like the clean look of it.
yeah – Not a fan of – tickers’
– I remember when AIM (Aol instant messenger) used to have a ticker for actual stocks / that didnt last long …
To begin with, I didn’t jump on the band wagon of Particls (aka Touchstone) for a while and didn’t understand the need for it until I really started to get a collection of RSS feeds in my Google reader. Now it has become an essential program on every computer I use.
My daily work is extensive as it is and I really cannot be bothered to browse my 50+ rss feeds, and other various data inputs to figure out what I should read. Each rss feed alone would produce on average 5 posts / day, 250 posts to read a DAY. I do need to work to make $.
If you are a basic rss reader (1-5 feeds), there is no need to use the software. However it won’t be long for a basic rss user to start adopting more feeds and before you know it, you’ve got 50, 100, 200 feeds to read. Particls is excellant in sorting your rss feeds and displaying what YOU want to read, just requires some simple setting up.
Ticker, I find the ticker very easy to use and one of my favourite output adapters of this application, however it’s not going to be everyone’s favourite – but you can simply turn it off. More and more output adapters are being developed every week, it’s just a matter of time before they are reviewed and approved for public release (no one wants a bad adapter do they?). I was one of the earlier users of Particls so I luckily get up-to-date from the developers on what’s new (and get to test them out).
BTW CodeMonkey, it probably won’t be long until the input feeds that are inserted into Particls will have better keyword matching by use of synonyms and other various types of methods.
“Personally, I want news when I start my RSS reader, not at random times during the day.” – Particls will give you the the news as it gets it, it won’t hold it for 2 hours or anything like that and then decide to give it to you, that would be stupid.
“Why does the domain have to be “particls”? Who the hell can remember that many names omitting letters? “Flickr” is enough! Please use some whole english words for your domain” – this guy doesnt understand the lack of remaining real word domains.
Nigel – that’s Aqua Dock (it’s a mockup of Apple’s OSX Dock for Windows). Available for Windows 98 to XP (haven’t seen it used on Vista yet).
ive never heard of this site so im just about to go ahead and test particls out. Any else have any comments about whether its useful or not?
I have been testing Particls for quite some time now (I am close friends with the founders Chris and Ashley). I have an example of how Particls has helped me.
I am a University student. As anybody who has had to study at uni can understand, researching assignments can be a long and tiresome process. For my last assignment, I used Particls to research. I added all my research topic words to Particles and lo and behold, I had about 20 relevant pages without actually having to waste time finding them myself. Sure, I may be a lazy bugger, but for me, Particls can be a really handy time saver.
I have my issues with Particls. As do many people who have used it for some time. But something that most people here don’t seem to understand is that Particls has only just gone Beta! You can’t expect perfection at a Beat release. Bugs take time to fix. There are priorities to sort out and the bug you have reported may very well be at the bottom of the list.
I am really disappointed in the people here (especially those at techcruch) for passing judgment on something that they really don’t seem to understand, or even tested. You don’t look at a new car and buy it without test driving it first… but then again, judging from your comments, maybe you do.
@Brad – haha, well said (last paragraph)