It is becoming clear that activity streams are taking hold as the default communications interface across a wide variety of social networks and media, from Twitter to Facebook to FriendFeed to Bebo and beyond. Yet the more people we try to keep track of in one consolidated feed, the more noise we have to deal with that increasingly threatens to drown out those golden information nuggets we all seek. So it is appropriate that today’s Elevator Pitch comes from Smallaa, a startup that aims to help people sort and categorize their streams by interests.
Smalla is still in private beta, but TechCrunch readers can sign up with the promotion code c3p0. When you sign up, you can bring in your FriendFeed stream. (Integration with Facebook is scheduled for April 23, and then Twitter will come after that). Your regular FreindFeed stream appears in a column on the right.
You also pick what interests you want to follow. For instance, I picked “Internet Startups,” “Technology,” “Google,” and “Unusual Things.” I could have also picked “best Photos,” “Pets,” “Formula 3 Racing,” “home,” or I could have created my own topics. Those selections create an interest stream on the left. This is the main Smaalla stream.
There are two ways you can inject something into the Smallaa stream. You can add it directly as a comment, link, video, or picture and assign it to an interest category when you place it into the stream. (Smallaa asks “What’s going on in your interests?” That could probably be clearer. A simple, “What are you intersted in?” would do.) The second way to inject items into the Smallaa stream is to assign them directly from the FriendFeed stream on the right (which will expand in the future to include Facebook and other streams as well).
For instance, Robert Scoble just wrote a post and did a video trying to explain why Mike is wrong about FriendFeed because of its superior mechansims for picking out signal to noise compared to Twitter. Scoble is particularly enamored with FriendFeed because he can pick out what’s interesting based on how many comments an item gets or how many people liked it. Yet with Smalla, I can simply grab the link to Scoble’s post from my FriendFeed stream and assign it to my “Technology” interest in Smallla. I trust what Scoble has to say about technology, so I pay attention to that, but I can ignore his comments about how awesome it is to live in Half Moon Bay.
Now, everybody in Smalla following with an interest in technology will see that link to Scoble’s post and any comments I have about it (unless they choose to view only items from people they follow in Smalla). The relationship between Smallaa and other services is reciprocal. When I add a post to Smallla, it appears in FriendFeed as well. And whenever you assign an item from a friend in another service, it prompts you to invite them to follow the particular interest you are assigning their item to in Smallla. Finally, as another way to figure out who to pay attention to, for each item in your Smallaa feed, it shows you how many people are following the person who posted it in that category. So again, to pick on Scoble, he might quickly gain the most followers in technology but not so many in fashion. Hopefully, this would create a reinforcing feedback loop which would encourage Scoble to write and share more about technology and less about his favorite pair of pants.
Or as Smalla CEO and founder Tim Lai says in the Elevator Pitch video below, it would be great to follow what Bill Clinton has to say about “politicians or giving public speeches without ever being distracted if he has anything to say about honesty and family values.” Lai built and sold his first software company in Hong Kong, an enterprise document management company called Paradigm, before moving to California. He has invested $3 million of his own money to start Smalllaa.
His pitch would probably have been less confusing if he explained why he is sitting in a racing car at the beginning, but he comes around to that in the end. If you would like your startup to be featured on TechCrunch, submit your Elevator Pitch.
Good Idea. I wish him all the best.
I couldn’t help but notice how deep his voice is for an Asian.
interesting concept that allows grouping along topics. I am in and playing with it and it is interesting. Not sure how it will play out. I wonder why the first integration point is friendfeed?
Can they expedite twitter integration?
Hey, FriendFeed beta does that too!
looks like I’m going to have to pay more attention to Friendfeed beta because I like this approach
This is cool!
Why is he in a race car?
What is the relevance?
At any rate, I am almost done netbooting pxelinux.0 to all the 10 LA servers in our project. Then I have to upgrade them to FC10, and they should be good to go with the one LVS server running as a router.
I tried to netboot FC10 but it wasn’t possible so I had to do FC8 with tftp and an apache server running on my laptop and Apache Update RPM to FC10.
Bummer. I hope the dude building the paypal interface is doing better than I am.
But anyway, WTF is going on with that race car?
Is this a race car application?
Its an iPhone App. “Say your an Asian dude that sounds like Barry White, and you need to sit in a F1 Racing car, for no particular reason… with your seatbelt on….” There’s an app for that.
Yeah, and the app name reads like Somalia…
lol. I Hope smalla succeeds
Topic: Social Networking
soon WallPipe is going to launch … although it does not integrate with other websites as there are many websites who do that already but yah …. it takes care of your privacy and Status updates.
Tried it, but I think I’ll stick with FriendFeed filters. May be interesting once they add Facebook, though (my Facebook newsfeed is unmanageable.)
A good technology for Smallaa to adopt is burst detection if they’re not using it already.
There is a good summary by Prof. John Kleinberg here on burst detection (plus pointers to codes & research papers) on the subject. Kleinberg was the guy who invented the HITS algorithm which is similar to Google PageRank although there are some differences. HITS came out almost the same time as PageRank and if Kleinberg went commercial with it exactly as Page & Brin with their PageRank, I guess that Google wouldn’t have been a dominant for in web search today. Ask.com which acquired Teoma uses a similar algorithm to HITS.
The application of burst is quite wide which ranges from topic/concept detection , scientific use, stock price burst to network intrusion detection burst and more.
Here is another good paper on burst detection:
Abstract:
——-
Burst detection is the activity of finding abnormal aggregates in data streams. Such aggregates are based on sliding windows over data streams. In some applications, we want to monitor many sliding window sizes simultaneously and to report those windows with aggregates significantly different from other periods. We will present a general data structure for detecting interesting aggregates over such elastic windows in near linear time. We present applications of the algorithm for detecting Gamma Ray bursts in large-scale astrophysical data. Detection of periods with high volumes of trading activities and high stock price volatility is also demonstrated using real time Trade and Quote (TAQ) data from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Our algorithm beats the direct computation approach by several orders of magnitude.
Download : Efficient Elastic Burst Detection in Data Streams
The paper above describes the use of wavelet algorithm commonly used in Physics & Signal Processing and there are lots of free wavelet packages on the internet. The best out there is the one from Stanford called WaveLab (written in matlab) which you can Google for the download link.
You can also Google search on the algorithm ICA (independent Component Analysis) which will bring up a few papers on using ICA for topic/concept detection in a dynamic environment as Chatroom (which services like Twitter, Facebook fall into this category). I can post you the links to those but TechCrunch only allows 2 links per message post.
correction:
I guess that Google wouldn’t have been a dominant for in web search today.
should be:
I guess that Google wouldn’t have been a dominant force in web search today.
Burst detection for streams is already being widely used in technologies such as those that power TechMeme and Google news.
Specifically I mean textual data streams, not statistical data streams. Though a few online applications do those also.
Burst has been around for some years now, so the technology concept is not new although new algorithms emerges all the time and the new ones that make the old ones obsolete. It doesn’t mean that someone is already using it then the world of research should stop searches for a better way.
TweetDeck was good enough for my father, and it’s good enough for me.
Silicon Valley is one big beta test for this “market”.
Most of the world doesn’t care about this stuff – they have bigger issues to deal with.
But… one day they will/might/could. When (not if) that day comes 6 months or 5 years out, there will be 1 or more proven dominant designs that would have shaken out (like the early days of the automobile)… This will only happen because of the various experiments we are seeing across all these startups we’re seeing – from the really small guys to the bigger ones like twitter, fb, friendfeed, etc.
To push this thought a bit further, we are participating in one massive open source internet experiment on building the next phase of internet/communication. In the really old days this would have been done over longer period of time either by prvate companies operating secretly or government labs. today, startups are opening the kimono for all to critique, putting their reputations, livelihood, etc. at stake for the purpose of progress (and of course $).
thoughts?
Interesting concept, but not sure what the value add is. You have access to my Friendfeed? Good, now suggest topics, content, and people based on what’s in there. Don’t make me name/categorize everything in there. Too much work.
I like this post and assigned it to topic "Internet Startups" at http://smallaa.com. I’d like to follow you in this topic if you could accept my invitation:http://www.smallaa.com/user/invitation/20?sn=FriendFeed&u=techcrunch&t=88&code=c3p0
BTW, I am really not into organizing S0eet, our startup. I organized in California last year and ended up having a filing nightmare with the 568, the FTB 3522, even though it was a disregarded LLC.
If you can help and can organize our company for us, please get a hold of me. And by organize it for us, I mean make it so we only have to do a 1040 next year.
Otherwise I do not know how I can possibly organize again due to the headaches. If you are an organizing pro, please contact me. We have a profitable business plan, we are software experts with professional computer science jobs.
The form filing and accounting is very intensive with this type of business, and we need somebody to take care of that. Not software like quickbooks, we need an actual living breathing person to file these forms. Of course that person can then use software.
please email soeet.com@gmail.com if you can organize for us and keep us away from the form filing and accounting. We need to be far away from that in order to do our jobs well setting up the product that people are going to pay for.
thanks!
… since we were on the subject of startups.
Notably, this issue is especially damning for Californians
http://turbotax...-corp/7374.html
Basically, my request is for a lawyer, or accountant that wants to invest in a startup, to invest in ours in time instead of money.
This new organization will be a multi-member LLC or s-corp so it can not be disregarded, or dealt with in a simplistic manner.
If we can not find such as person we will have to finish as a proof of concept and sell off our big server rigs and software as an intellectual property sale. So we would lose a lot of money doing that.
We’re just professional programmers, so anybody that can point us in the right direction, please get a hold of me.
Staring at code all day @ work doesn’t really prepare you for this. I also have a premium membership at VCExperts.com, but that didn’t prepare me either. I’m just not trained for that roll. Neither is anybody else.
I would be 100% with FriendFeed if it could actually merge my friend lists properly. Until I no longer have to create imaginary friends for interesting Twitter users who aren’t on FriendFeed, it just won’t work for me. Perhaps Smallaa solves that? Doubtful they’ll beat the gang at FriendFeed
@Patrick it seems like that’s where they’re headed, as soon as they turn on Facebook and Twitter integration. Still, I agree with Ryan, what’s the point?
The point is to identify and follow only the best aspect of the people we know. We can have a lot of followers in some topics and not very few in others. This creates incentive for people to post things that they people around them likes.
Smallaa isn’t trying to replace friendfeed. In fact, it makes the ff feeds much more valuable: when your ff feeds are on the right and Smallaa feeds (interest feeds from friends) left, you will actually find the ff experience even more interesting. You can now afford to have huge amount of friends and without having to sort through things. While you are viewing your interests feed on the left, good stuff just naturally ‘jumps’ to you.
Social networking is not about connection per se; it’s a way for us to identify the best aspects of the people around us and use them in a mutually beneficial way.
Categorizing the activity streams based on our interested topics is a good idea. I guess this has already been done by many companies that use Twitter’s streams. One of my favorites is http://www.boilingpage.com that shows hottest pages on the web based on how popular they are in Twitter. They have a ‘feed’ mechanism where I can register a keyword and they send me updates by email. Good luck to Smalaa ..
@Ryan and @Pat – totally agree that categorization needs to be automatic. For a while I was working on a project (mioNews) that did exactly that and built on top of FriendFeed, but I had to focus on my full time effort (if you’re interested: cloud-based load testing services – http://browsermob.com)
Smallaa is all about simplicity. See for yourself.
Hmm, interesting. Seems like they have come quite far with their technology.
Someone help me
- When is this seemingly endless loop of info aggregation/filter over another info aggregation/filter stop?
- Who is going to make money on this quasi-ponzi scheme?
- Are these companies creating ANYTHING tangible or connecting ANYONE who is really not connecting?
In a VC lingo, “this is a feature, not a product.”
Would prefer my username to show ‘joedawson’ instead of the beginning of my email address!
As an Israeli of Iraqi descendant, I remember my mother uses the word smallaa occasionally.
If I remember correctly it means “..and save me God”.
Funny perspective fur such service.
I’ll not forget that name antime soon (-:
They apparently have severe problems with languages other than English. Most of my friends at FriendFeed write in cyrillic – their posts imported in absolutely unreadable manner.
yeah I totally agree, who said they don’t put peanuts where cash is needed.
However where joomla fails can be summed up in one statement “a full service complete solution”, aka thats not how its being piped out and anayway would not the API be better positioned in the rack space market?
for my two cents worth, lol
keep up the feeds.
aggregating social experience is not that key factor at smallaa; it’s a new a way to induce more relevancy in your streams of feeds. you can see that your friends actually like you much more in some topics than others, so you will post more things that there a ‘marketable’.
Here’s some of my opinions about this company:
1) Really? someone actually found a way to get funding for this?
2) How does this company expect to be remotely profitable?
3) I don’t trust any company that cant even set up their voicemail box. Give it a try, (408) 944-9420.
4) I’ll be surprised if this company is still around by this time next year.
My declaration: smallaa is byyee byyee
Here’s some of my opinions about this company:
1) Really? someone actually found a way to get funding for this?
2) How does this company expect to be remotely profitable?
3) I don’t trust any company that cant even set up their voicemail box. Give it a try, (408) 944-9420.
4) I’m still confused as to how this website is supposed to be useful.
5) I’ll be surprised if this company is still around by this time next year.
My declaration: smallaa is byyee byyee
Although, I can see that smalla’s (1 a or 2?) only chance was to leverage it to friendfeed for them to purchase the “technology”. Sadly, looks like FF beat them to it with their beta features.
and I agree… what’s with the racecar? Bad bad pitch. Two thumbs down from me.
Thought I’d give this one a try, looked interesting. Has anyone tried using or found a way to use it? Thouroughly confusing!
@Fellows: I agree with all your items, big waste. another dot-bust