A bit of history:
I experienced a huge brain- and world-expanding time during my Nokia Lifeblog years (2004-05). Early on, we paired up with Six Apart (via Marko Ahtisaari and Joi Ito), and I spent a lot of time under Loïc LeMeur’s wing promoting blogging, Six Apart, and Lifeblog, and meeting some of the key movers in the nascent Web 2.0 (thank you, Loïc).
In those days, I pushed for the fusion of web and mobile, started seeing how everything was coming in as streams, and how people started exuding their own lifestreams. The next logical idea was how to bring that together.
In 2006, the poster child was NetVibes. But I though we could do better. Some started talking about personal aggregators, Digital Lifestyle Aggregators, the widgetization of everything.
Morsels:
For me, the sweetspot was to be the one holding all the morsels (He who hold the morsels, holds the experience. “The structure holding the morsels becomes the experience” – Fabio Sergio), a dynamic dashboard where all my social streams come in, where I could mix and match, and then send all the things of note out back into the streams.
This was my original vision of what should have become Ovi.com. Alas, I could point to so many places where the harpoon was sunk and twisted into me (and into those who stayed on), but I had been given a huge wad of cash to do it, and I f-ed it up by not channeling my inner-Jobs and insisting we stay true to vision.
Lesson learned. Enough self-pitying. I had my chance and blew it.
In the time since, I have seen attempts to create similar services, and even some blatant suggestions from some great thinkers as to what was missing in this age of lifestreams (which I thought would be in 2008). But nothing really took hold (though I think Seesmic desktop shows promise).
Bottlenose:
And, lo, on comes a new service. And from a brilliant semantic web guy with a track record of actually coming out with things that I thought approached what I wanted to see.
“Bottlenose is a new social media dashboard for influencers of all stripes. But it’s not just for posting and reading; it helps you filter and manage your networks with semantics and machine learning. It’s all Web-based, written in HTML 5 and Javascript. It does the data crunching on the browser side (for the non-pro users), so you get native performance behind these major operations reading and parsing your stream.”
Read this article from Read Write Web
I signed up and have been checking it out. Of course, I’m sure this is better than whatever I would have built in 2007, given how the Web and mobile world have changed since then. I think one issue that could come to bite is any deviation from the usual UI folks are accustomed to for scanning info and streams. The weirder, the less likely someone will use it without feeling geeky.
In any case, I’m excited to play with it. If you check it out, let me know what you think of it.
One more thing:
I’ve also evolved my thinking since 2007 and think Bottlenose should be a P2P system. Take back the Cloud!
Image from the Read Write article on Bottlenose.
