"Particls is the coolest thing I've seen in
quite a while"
Marshall Kirkpatrick
"I could even see my folks getting excited about
this"
SuperHelix (User)
"Particls has every chance of becoming [a]
standard"
Michael Mahemoff
Software as She's Developed
Friday, June 20, 2008
Engagd among the top 5 apps in Australia
Ross Dawson has published a list of the top 60 web apps in Australia in the BRW this week. At number 5, our very own Engagd.com - the engine that powers Attention Profiling for the web at large as well as Particls version 2.
This is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the development team. A huge thanks to Ashley Angell, Paul Jones and Jon Cianciullo who have been working tirelessly to manage, build and polish the Engagd platform.
Particls itself came in at 21. That will change of course once we launch the new version!
Thanks to Ross for his hard work compiling the list and including us.
Ashley went to Sydney to demo Engagd at the celebration party. By all accounts it was a big success. Somehow he made a developer platform interesting for a non-technical audience. Good work my friend!
There are only a limited number of start-up founders in the world, even less who sets his or her mind to change the very fabric of the internet. Chris is one of them.
When Chris and I founded Faraday Media, it was of extreme importance that just being another startup was not enough. We had to do something meaningful. Something significant. Not happy with fame or glory, we wanted to grow as people - giving back to a medium which had fed us for long time. To take the internet to a new place, just like Google had done nearly a decade ago. Its been a long road for Faraday, and while it hasn't always been easy, Chris' drive and aspiration has bought us to new and extraordinary heights, time after time after time; often at great personal sacrifice. I could never ask for a better CEO, or friend.
It's no secret that Chris and I are the best of friends and it makes me very happy, to congratulate him on being selected as one of the 30Under30's for Anthill, the leading entrepreneurial magazine in Australia.
From the website:
At 26, Chris Saad is one of Australia's most impressive young web entrepreneurs. His theory and practice around web standards - specifically 'DataPortability' and 'Attention Management' - have gained significant traction and are set to have a profound impact on the evolution of media in the digital age. Saad has co-founded several web-related companies and organisations, most prominently Faraday Media in 2006, of which he is CEO. Faraday Media is developing Particls, a technology that learns user habit and taste and delivers relevant information to them via news crawler, SMS, email, flash visualisations, etc. He also co-founded the Media 2.0 Workgroup with 14 industry 'commentators, agitators and innovators'. There's no shortage of ideas or energy in this digitally-minded entrepreneur. One to watch in the years to come.
Make sure you click through to the Article, subscribe to the mag and read the other 29 profiles!
This is recognition to a man whom has dedicated and sacrificed so much for the greater good, a true philanthropist. Well done Chris, you are definitely deserving of this prestigious award and will no doubt be one of many in the years to come.
VIDEO PROJECT - Share your thoughts about DataPortability
Time to continue the conversation about DataPortability... this time using video.
We want to hear your thoughts about DataPortability recorded as a short video. We hope to share these videos individually as well as compile them into a single video to help the community understand expectations, goals and themes that are emerging in the discussion.
Here are the questions we'd like you to answer.
What does DataPortability mean to you?
How do you imagine DataPortability might change the way you use the web?
How would you explain the value of DataPortability to Vendors - those that store the data.
How would you explain the value of DataPortability to Users - those that create and own the data.
Ideally, what would you like to see from the DataPortability Project in the next 12 months? 24 months?
What else would you like to say? Make up a question and answer it!
Finally, if you agree with the sentiment, please say "My name is [your name] and I want Data Portability" at the end of your video.
If you can, please try to limit the video to a maximum of 5 minutes.
We'd like to compile these for February 20th. Please make sure you get your video in before then!
To submit the video, post it to one of the video sharing sites and tag it 'DataPortabilityAndMe'
I look forward to seeing what the community has to say.
Special thanks to Daniela Barbosa, Chris Messina and the Evangelism Action Group for this idea!
Individuals from Plaxo, Google and Facebook join DataPortability.org Workgroup
We are proud to announce the inclusion of Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook) to the DataPortability Workgroup.
Plaxo, Google and Facebook together represent the key players in the competing approaches to Social Networking platforms and Data Portability.
Their joint support of the DataPortability initiative presents a new opportunity for the next generation of software - particularly in the fields of social software, user rights and interoperability.
The DataPortability Workgroup is, among other things, actively working to create the 'DataPortability Reference Design' to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability.
This means users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.
We look forward to their contribution to the conversation.
More about the DataPortability initiative:
Our Philosophy: As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.
Our Mission: To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. And, to promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.
Besides these new additions, the WorkGroup includes, among others, Chris Saad (Faraday Media), Stephen Kelly (Peepel), Ben Metcalfe (Consultant to Seesmic and Myspace), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency, Microformats), Daniela Barbosa (Dow Jones), Phil Morle, Ian Forrester (BBC), Kristopher Tate (Zooomr), Paul Keen (NineMSN), Brian Suda, Emily Chang (eHub), Danny Ayers (Talis), Robyn Tippins (Yahoo!), Robert Scoble (PodTech).
Welcoming Robert Scoble to the DataPortability workgroup
As many of you know, Faraday Media has long been a champion of user rights. We believe the user has an absolute right to own and control their personal information.
As such we created and promoted APML as an open standard very early in our company history. We then started the DataPortability Workgroup. A group dedicated to championing the cause of other open standards by putting them each in context as part of an end-to-end solution stack.
Since then, we have been both gratified and spirited by the support from the worlds thought leaders on the subjects of open standards, social networking and web-based software.
I'd now like to welcome Robert Scoble to the list of supporters and workgroup members. Robert is also a fellow member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup and his tireless efforts to demonstrate how being open, transparent and social can scale to celebrity scales always influences the conversation and helps to shine a spotlight on worthy companies and causes.
Semantic Apps will become popular in 2008, due to their ability to get better content results and make better data connections. Think search engines like Hakia and Powerset, wikipedia-like efforts like Twine and Freebase, and apps that use semantic technologies under the hood.
The big Internet companies will surprise us all by embracing open standards, and attempting to compete with each other with features instead of data lock-in (OK, this could just be wishful thinking!).
We have already seen Mozilla move in this direction with Weave. Google with OpenSocial. Hopefully 2008 will see true openness with use of existing standards such as those listed at DataPortability.org
For anyone who reads feeds, though, prioritization and personalized recommendations are two things that hold a whole lot of promise.
In 2007 both Bloglines and Newsgator were among the companies who moved towards implementing a simple, open Attention Data standard called APML. A wide variety of other companies began experimenting with other methods of systematizing and automating prioritization and recommendation as well. Expect this to be even bigger in 2008.
Web 1.0 was about Pages, Web 2.0 is about People, Web 3.0 will be about data.
Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins dedicates a whole section to APML (here):
You're going to see bigger partnerships emerge, along that same token, between the APML movement, the OpenID movement, and the big dogs like Microsoft, Facebook and Google. Remember that whole privacy debacle called Beacon? At some point real soon Zuckerberg is going to realize that to keep that very vocal minority of people who like privacy quiet, he's going to need to give them better ownership of their profile and attention data - APML and OpenID will provide ways for this to happen.
Josh Catone writes:
OpenID will be adopted by more startups and larger web companies, but most people (mainstream users) still won't use it - that's a couple of years off.
Perhaps DataPortability will help drive the value proposition.
Fav.or.it have announced an intention to support APML on their blog. From the video it looks like a very impressive feed reading app - can't wait to play with it!
A new staff member joined the Faraday Media team today. Dallas is an old colleague and is helping us out part-time.
In his other job, Dallas is working as a multimedia lecturer at a Technical College just north of Brisbane so he bring a lot of fresh and innovative ideas to the Faraday Team.
The long awaited update to the APML site is here. We have tried to make it a little less geeky and a little more user-friendly. But we have also expanded the Geek/Developer sections to help you get started quickly!
It can also be set to "Auto-hide" so that it takes up less space while keeping users informed.
It is now the default output adapter for Particls. It joins the Ticker (now disabled by default) and Popup Alerts as part of the bundled set of adapters.
Nick Hodge, a Professional Geek at Microsoft says "I think Particls just changed my life. I've replaced my Microsoft Windows Vista Sidebar with this new version of Particls. Having Particls watch the web for me keeps me on-the-ball, more than caffeine. Well, almost."
Experience your news, alerts and updates like never before. Subscribe to your feeds, type in your interests and watch them stream in like a slick river of news.
Got a better idea? Write your own output adapter. Particls is the best Alerts and Attention Management Platform around.
The latest version of Particls has lots of nifty enhancements and improvements however I wanted to bring your attention to one in particular.
There is a setting in the 'Skins and Settings' property sheet called 'AutoupdateType'
From now on, we will be pushing 'Experimental Builds' first, then Minor Builds second, then Major Builds third.
This means if you consider yourself a hardcore tester and true Particls fan, you can get more updates, earlier, by using the 'Experimental Builds' setting. This exposes you to more risks (as far as using Beta software goes), but it also means that you can get in early and have your say on bugs and features
It also means that if you are a user who prefers to keep a stable, smooth operation, you will see less updates and less hickups in your Particls experience!
Thanks to the usual hard work of the Dev team especially Ash and Paul for this one.
You would have learned about this first on Tangler and Twitter.
In this build we have really focused on reducing memory, CPU and bandwidth consumption - particularly for new users. Some older users will not see too much improvement but we will work on those next!
Better international support (especially a fix for the input string error many international users were getting)
An about page
Many little tweaks and bugfixes (learn more on the release notes)
Unfortunately our auto-updater process in the last build was a bit broken so you have to download it manually at www.particls.com/download. Future updates should come through automatically via Auto-Update (unless you turn that feature off of course).
Thanks for your great feedback guys - we are listening! Many of your suggestions will be included in future builds.
After many months of anticipation, we are happy to announce that Particls is going Public Beta today.
For users: Particls is a filtered news reader or widget that learns what you care about and alerts you to important news and information while you work. More at www.particls.com
For bloggers and site owners: Particls allows bloggers and site owners to create a custom version of the application. Particls will share revenue with partners. More at www.particls.com/about/publishers
For developers: Particls is freely extensible by developers. Reach into corporate databases and web APIs to grab and display data in new and interesting ways. More at http://www.particls.com/extensions/
How much is it: Particls is a free download with some ads. Later, an ad-free Pro version will be available for a small subscription fee. It is free for Partners to create custom versions.
What's new in public beta: Particls is now no longer invite only. Anyone will be able to download it from the download page. Also, bloggers can now embed Particls widgets on the blog sidebars or create white label version of Particls. Learn more here.
Got a Mac: We love Mac - A Mac native version is coming. Here are some instructions to use parallels or watch the demos.
Sending feedback: The Particls team loves feedback - get int touch via: Email, Tangler, Twitter, and of course, right here in the comments
A little about Particls - for end users The web is just too big. No one has time to keep track of all the sites, conversations and interesting bits and pieces that are out there. We each have real work to do and lives to live!
Particls helps you track your favorite sites and applications by displaying desktop alerts for important changes.
Subscribe to the sites you like best, and then when they change you're notified. Particls can even work out how important the new information is and display an alert that is proportional to its importance to you.
For example, general information might be displayed on a news ticker, important stuff might appear on a popup alert and urgent information might be SMS'd to your phone.
Think of it like a highly advanced widget or filtered feed reader.
A little about Particls - for bloggers and site owners Through the Particls partner program, bloggers and site owners can create a custom version of Particls. They can change the skin, default feeds and default Attention Profile to give users their own branded desktop notification system.
By integrating Particls into their site, partners get more return traffic, their brand on desktops everywhere and a share of revenue.
This service is free for partners to participate in. Learn more at www.particls.com/intouch
A little about Faraday Media Particls is owned and operated by Faraday Media. Faraday was founded by 2 'Twenty Something' Australian entrepreneurs.
Faraday Media focuses on helping users deal with information overload by creating tools that generate a highly personalized view of worldwide information and entertainment media.
The company has been in operation since July 2006 (product development started earlier in January 2006). In that time it has launched Alpha and Beta versions of Particls to over 4000 self-subscribed testers, secured Angel Funding and attracted attention from global media and financial services brands as well as high-profile technology leaders.
The company has also been an active contributor to the community founding the APML and Media 2.0 workgroups and open sourcing some of its software.
More Information
More information for bloggers can be found on the website or contact Chris Saad (Co-Founder/CEO) at chris@particls.com
Thanks We would like to thank all those who have made it possible for us to get to this major milestone. Your generous help and advice has been always been very much appreciated.
In yet another milestone for the APML Workgroup and the APML format, we have published the first open source libraries for loading and manipulating APML files.
From the site:
APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.
The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.
These libraries are a result of months of R&D and iteration by the Faraday Media development team and we donate them to the community in the spirit of open collaboration and mutual benefit. They are released under the extremely liberal Apache 2.0 license.
We encourage anyone who would like to support or modify the libraries to get in touch so we can help in any way we can.
My thanks to Ashley our CTO and Mike and Paul the two ninja programmers who have been involved with the library and the APML workgroup who's input has helped to create the 0.6 spec.
We look forward to seeing what new and interesting projects get created with this resource.
It has a special skin and is pre-set with all the feeds and the right Attention Profile so you can great real-time coverage of the event while you work.
The download is actually the full featured Particls client so you can re-skin it back to the standard skin or add-remove your own feeds and OPML after the expo is over.
More about Particls Particls is an Attention Management Engine. Check out the screencasts to learn more how it works or check out the website.
Wondering how we did it? Watch a video of Particls (then Touchstone) being reskinned and pre-set in 4 mins here
We would like to announce that the first full private release of Particls Beta has been distributed. If you signed up to our mailing list your invite should be in your inbox.
All those months of locking Ashley in the programming box have paid off!
On behalf of all the team I would like to thank all the people who have made this milestone possible. You all know who you are but if I may highlight a few below (in no particular order!):
Ashley Angell
Nik Seirlis
Stephen Kelly
Cody Robb
Paul Jones
Michael McNeil
Michael Starky
Julie Angell
Marty Wells
Michael Liubinskas
Marjolein Hoekstra
Ben Metcalfe
Daniela Barbosa
Marianne Richmond
The Alpha and Beta testers of Touchstone and Particls
Thanks everyone
We look forward to your feedback.
Missed out? Drop me a line and the next 50 requests get an instant invite.
In anticipation of a wider release of the Application, we are excited to announce a new name for Touchstone. Introducing... Particls.
And, of course, a new domain at www.particls.com. Please update your links!
Why the name change? We feel that Particls better reflects our future plans for the product as it evolves into the definitive tool to manage and filter your incoming personal information.
Announcing support for Linkedin and Subscription Plugins
Imagine getting alerted instantly when your LinkedIn contacts have a job on offer or when they add a new contact you might want to know.
The latest build of Touchstone does just that. If you have your copy check it out in the Subscription Helper.
Now imagine doing it for MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 etc. The latest build of Touchstone also makes that possible!
Paul has added a feature called 'Subscription Plugins' that allows developers to quickly and easily write little XML files that add Touchstone subscription support to all sorts of services.
Combined with Dapper.net this sort of functionality can be taken to a whole new level - making it easy for users to get alerts from all your favorite web apps - even those that don't support RSS (without the need to write dedicated Input Adapters).
We have included support for LinkedIn already - we look forward to see what the community can come up with. Be sure to email us your plugins.
Also, since this type of extensibility is a first in the Feed Reading space (as far as we know) we would be interested in collaborating with other feed readers out there to add universal support and working with app developers to build their own plugins for the Subscription Helper. Drop me a line.
“The Media 2.0 Workgroup is a group of industry commentators, agitators and innovators who believe that the phenomena of democratic participation will change t
