Faraday Media will today launch a new sidebar based version of attention management tool Particls, as well as a new attention platform Engagd.
The Particls Sidebar provides a same attention feed based information as the Particls ticker; a personalized, streaming view of everything that matters to the user online in real-time, but in a sidebar.
The Particls sidebar is a welcome alternative to the previous product that is bound to find more fans, although those fans will be restricted to Windows rat this stage.
A TechCrunch themed sidebar can be downloaded here.
The new Engagd is billed as “the first ever standards based, open Attention Platform.”
Engagd is said to turn Lifestreams into APML by using APML to create ranked/filtered feeds. Engagd allows users to subscribe to filtered feeds in any standard feed reader to help with information overload.
Engagd though isn’t for the average user; the product is aimed squarely at Developers of apps, mashups and “savvy early adopters.”
Dandelife.com is the first to implement the Lifestreaming APML service from Engagd.
Information overload might be better solved by considering whether one needs to subscribe to so many feeds in the first place. (Radical, perhaps – but that’s the premise of bit literacy.)
my first impression of Faraday Media is not good… they should know better to use a splash for their webpage but worst than that is the fact they use a 2mb jpg for the splash page…
I think it’s a cool idea, but these sidebars tend to be more distracting than anything else. I’ll have to download it and check it out.
I have been using Particls for a long time even pre-Beta and it has done a great job at capturing my attention daily across the various interests i have. I work for a media content aggregator/producer and consume a lot of content in multiple ways – Particls is one of them and it finds and alerts me to things that i would probably not find with any of my other RSS readers. Unlike many of the Techcrunch readers- i use RSS feeds to do my job and certainly have plenty of stories to tell of how it has helped me better engage with my customers and find new opportunities.
Here is video where i talk about my use of Particls and do a little demo:
http://danielab...lized-news.html
Particls team- the new sidebar is very useful- especially when i have my two screens going at work. Lovely video demo by the way (http://www.vidd...sSaad/videos/1/) but Chris you seem to forget to be tracking my name- ha.
very much look forward to testing out services that use Engagd- especially if dealing with Attention in the Enterprise space. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in discussing Attention in the Enterprise.
They need a round of funding so they can afford some vowels.
I am on an assignment to help a Huge Financial Services Firm’s Innovations Guru realize his amazing vision of info-sharing content through his company using attention data. Tristan Roy and Bronwen Clune both recommended I meet Chris Saad of Particls. I installed it and didn’t grok it right away. This morning, I saw Chris on Skype and he removed the scales from my eyes.
I have yet to check out Engagd yet but he sent me some info and told me not to say anything until the big dogs did their blogging. I am going to check it out now…
@Beck: it seems even TechCrunch could use some of those vowels. See the title of the post and permalink of this post: it reads Farady instead of Faraday. Guess inbound links will break if Duncan fixes it.
And again, a broken link to engagd in the article (lots of broken links lately!) this one has ww.engagd.com — the ‘ww’ throwing invalid host. just engagd.com works.
“Windows rat.” Heh.
How can one use this to market their site? I loved your idea on creating skins for TechCrunch and giving the skins out to everyone on this blog. Are there any other ways to build attention, traffic and loyalty through this clean software tool for the obsessed? I know that one can just add subs to the whole bloglines idea as well as MyYahoo! but are there going to be ways to monetize on this avenue of attention management software?
@iMarketingGuru
You can indeed do that. Particls is actually the first aggregator we know of to share revenue with publishers. You can re-skin it and pre-set it with RSS feeds and send it to users just like Techcrunch has done.
Learn more here: http://www.part...toyouraudience/
I like the themed idea. It will be interesting to see the results of this after a couple of months to see if people have a main source or whether they draw from the ‘wisdom of the blogosphere’ to spread the net.
Next I’d like to see them do something social where what my friends get could appear on my radar if enough of them do it.
@me – 2mb? It’s 200k. And it’s the corporate page. But yeah, it’s maybe due for an update.
@Mick
I like the idea of Particls being a social notifier.
The flowing sidebar display really lends itself to that sort of use.
It is actually possible to track what your friends are bookmarking and digging by subscribing to their ‘lifestream’ feeds. The result would even be filtered based on your own personal interests.
It’s not as easy as it could be though of course – and as you suggest Particls could go a long way to making it easier with some additional features.
Also note that you can right click on items and you will see a context menu that lets you send the item to Digg, Del.icio.us and others – so Particls lets you get social through existing social services. Developers can also extend the context menu.
I’ve written more about this here: http://www.part...ndation-30.html
I might be one of their most vocal evangelists, so it’s clear where I stand on Particls.
Sure, it needs a bit of tweaking (e.g., the ticker should take up less real estate, sources rated as “Strongly Dislike” should effectively be removed from results ASAP, things like this).
For us alpha geeks, I’m not sure it really does much. But I’ve had the opportunity to install and see Particls in action with people who would never, ever use a RSS reader or visiting a blog. But the idea of adding keywords (and being able to rate the importance of specific keywords), combined with the automatic adding of RSS feeds from visited sites, makes the whole idea of capturing new sources of information — primarily blogs — painless to newbies … and people determined to remain newbies because, in general, they think that blogs are crap (and, in general, I tend to agree).
BTW, I use Omea Pro, Google Reader, Bloglines, GreatNews RSS Reader, the Firefox RSS Ticker add-on, and the Google Desktop Web Alerts gadget. I still like the Particls ticker and their Peebles feed. Good stuff. I keep the content in each very different so I don’t have very much overlap, so the systems work very well, as complementary sources.