Popego helps people find more meaning in their social graphs online. The Argentinean startup presented today during the Collaboration session of TechCrunch50 and has just launched its service into public beta. You can watch the video of Popego’s presentation here.
Once signed up for Popego, you can add usernames from all of your social networks (passwords are not required). The service then brings you to a page where all of your interests are shown as tags, which have been pulled and generated from your activity on services like Twitter, Delicious, and FriendFeed.
Then, based on those interests, Popego populates your page with content – such as Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and stories posted to FriendFeed – that it believes you will like.
If you don’t agree with the interests generated by Popego based on your accounts elsewhere, you can change your interest profile with slider equalizers that tell Popego what you’d like in your timeline of content.
Each bookmark, story, video, or photo added to your timeline also includes a percentage interest match based on the relevancy of your interests. A higher percentage means you’re more likely to like the element.
In the right-hand side of the site, you can filter the interest feed even further by indicating that you want to see only videos, stuff from friends, etc.
For each piece of content in the timeline, you can click on the contributor’s username and it will display a popup card with information about them. The popup can be used to get an idea about the person and see what that person is reading and doing online. The popup also works as a widget that can be embedded on your blog or elsewhere.
More features are in the pipe, among them a set of charts and widgets. So-called “autoblogs” also let you see more about people on Popego and their interests.
Expert Panel
Kevin Rose:
“I think a lot of this is really interesting. One of the things we struggle with is to get the most relevant data to people. When I look at Friendfeed and Socialthing, I wonder if this is something that will break out and have massive adoption or is this just Silicon Valley, Web 2.0. I like what you’re doing and I think it’s very unproven.”
Founder Santiago Sir:
“What we envision is that there is a new dimension of interests that emerges over the social graph, you can call it the interest graph.”
Founder Emiliano Kargieman:
“The Web is becoming more noisy, it is very hard to keep up, so in some way the only way to explore the Web in the future is if the Web knows us and tries to filter it.”
Roelof Botha:
“Presentation was well done and it’s quick to see how you can get benefit from your service and the design and interface is well done. I like that you’re trying to solve the overload problem, but I worry about distribution and I don’t know how I would see it gaining mass adoption. I’m also suspect about the business model.”
Mark Cuban:
“You’re becoming part of a class of network management tools. The more traffic you have, the more latency you have, the more you want to create efficiency. What you’re going to need is something that really stands out and makes people go “wow.” You’ll all grab what the other people are doing and need to preempt something else that others can’t do. Or they can do something that’s just cool. But if you can come up with something in terms of interface, you’ve got all kinds of stuff you can do. You have to find something sexy.”
first!
Clicking on the “Join now” link at their website, I get the following message:
“Page Not Found. Looks like you are lost. But there’s still hope.”
Sorry but if they’re not capable of maintain a working link for the one and only available action (join the site) then at least they should reform their message stating something like:
“Page not found. Looks like *we* are lost. But there’s hope our site will work.”
I just confirmed your reported problem. Yup. not good
From the company’s mission I imagine it’s pronounced “pop ego,” but am I the only one who reads their name as “pope go?” Shades of Pen Island.
Registration is up now
Congratulations! And thanks for making me famous
This does sound really great, I hope it works!
This automatic recommendations filtering is something I hope Google Reader integrates, I don’t understand why Google Reader has feed recommendations, but they don’t have post recommendations.
Anyways, right now popego.com doesn’t seem to work. They should install it on Google App Engine so that it can scale automatically with demand..
Hi Charbax, thanks for your comment. We have Popego on Amazon’s Elastic Cloud but apparently the amount of hits has been enormous so far. We are working hard to handle all the traffic in the next days.
On Mark Cuban’s comments, I think one of the characteristics that sets Popego apart is the interface, although I imagine there is room for improvement, it is already “sexy”, but I do share Kevin’s concerns about mass adoption.
@EH, to me its neither pop-ego or pope-go its poh peh goh (in spanish)
@Andres Barreto you are right (i think) its poh peh goh (in spanish).
I’m a user of Popego since i heard of it (in Alpha). I’m really happy with it, is simple, fast, sexy, and make my Web ID visible in one place.
Popego Rocks!
Best wishes from Palermo Valley, Argentina!
p.s.: The founder is Santiago Siri*, not Sir
Great idea. I alread signed up and I’m adding my usernames to see how Popego performs. Great latam initiative. Congratulations.
Guys,
Amazing work with popego, I already have it since may and well I just can’t believe how far they have reach with this service, I’m a fan of it.
It truly shows all things a group can do if there is an objective and synergy.
Congrats
Mark
Popego is a great app, I’ve been a fan for a while.
The expert panel definitely brought up some interesting points – distribution, mass adoption, differentiation, business model, etc – but these guys are smart enough and, more importantly, driven enough, to figure it out.
popego rocks!!
keep up with the great work!!!
felicitaciones!!!
Bravo for Popego!
Popego only use “usernames” of my services… not passwords!
great idea! is the best!
…is the best for privacy!
Popego is an excellent idea!!
Great App for those of us who can´t live without a lot of blogs everyday!
Congratulations Popego team for en excellent product and the beta release!
I’ve been testing Popego for a while, and it’s really amazing. Its recommendation engine is great, the design is really sexy and also, the general idea for this online application is new and clever. The whole interest graph concept that Santi mentioned in the talk is innovative and useful, and I think Popego is starting the trend of working towards explicitly working on such graph, a trend that many others will follow in the future. Way to go Popego.
Bravo! As an argentinean web developer, I´m very proud to see this, a fully argentinean web product! I hope that Popego marks us the path, so we can see more brilliant argentinean web apps in the future.
Go Popego!
Amazing concept!
Popego is wonderfull tool!, thanks!, I’m using in my blog!
Great product guys, keep up with the good work.
Just one suggestion for you guys, change the color of your logo icon, it looks like one of those Halloween pumpkins and not sure it will generate positive feelings among first time visitors/users.
Alex.. never thought that about our logo.. interesting observation! Thanks.
The image of the pumpkin is prominent is the north american culture. I showed your logo to my friend and asked her “what do you think about it” and first thing she said was “this is a scary version of the happy face”. I’m surprised nobody in the panel pointed it out, maybe they didn’t pay attention to it.
POPEGO=AMAZING!
BRAVO POPEGO
¡Felicitaciones! Great projet
Popego is a very (very, very) interesting project. I´m happy for the guys in charge.
As an early adopter of Popego, i have been accompanying his evolution from the alpha version to this beta and i only can say that we are at the very beginning of something radically new.