Solving the information overload problem in the fast-moving world of social media is an incredible task - one that seems to be increasing as we take on more networks, more followers and more places to get impacted, from our PCs to tablets and mobile phones. Even the most focused among us can't get to every great link that gets passed to us from friends, which is why the "news will find me" strategy of years past simply doesn't pass muster any more. In this gap is coming a flotilla of personalization engines, but also services that look deep into your streams and find the best links for you. The newest is a two-man operation called "Know About It" at the simple URL: http://knowabout.it. Their goal? Find the links you might have missed.

One of the company's calls to action is that the noisiest people with the most followers who update with the most frequency can "drown out the ones who are more selective and thoughtful with what they share." With this in mind, the product surfaces recommendations both inside and outside your social streams, and provides a unique wrinkle called "potentially missed" shared from "some of the quietest people" in your network.


Unlike some services which require a good amount of explicit information filled out to feed the system, or others who claim to watch your behavior and find the best based on your preferences, Knowabout.it already has recommendations for you when you first enter the site, even if all you brought was your Twitter account.


For me, someone who is close to constantly connected in combination with my focus on my6sense, you would be hard pressed to find great stuff from my network I hadn't yet seen, but Know About It's recommendations aren't bad at all. Top links came from Marshall Kirkpatrick about predictions from Quora and Akula talking about more engineering heads at Microsoft, as well as a Hacker News article on Twitter's onboarding process. It wasn't a perfect run on the first try, but a hit rate of more than 2/3rd is very good.


The site, founded by Kevin Marshall and Will Cole (@falicon and @willcole), doesn't exactly make it clear why some items are selected for you, but a post on the service's blog from January 27th starts to provide hints, saying they are watching popular posts that rise due to frequency of links, retweets, clicks from within the site and bit.ly stats. But their focus on quieter sources promises to go beyond the noise and to find the best from all the streams.


The site seems to be focused on finding some great links, and leveraging content from friends' streams to see what you might like as well. For example, I can "Peek" and see updates from Atul Arora's collection or Pete Warden, but the refresh rate won't keep you around long. It's not clear that reading an article dismisses it from your stream, and from my looking, my collection takes more than an hour to update, so realtime it's not - at least, not until the founders increase the polling speed.

Of interest, you can also build saved searches to update you on keywords that enter your stream. You can get an email or RSS feed for watched terms, and if aggressive, you can get them up to every 15 minutes, so if you set up monitor for a top keyword like iPhone or Android, prepare for your in box to get hit early and often.

If you have that nagging feeling that even through your usual use of the Web, you're not getting to all the good stuff, knowabout.it might find you some of those missing pieces. It's early days for the service, and it's still not open to everyone, but you should get your name on the list for the time the doors open.

Disclosure: I am VP of Marketing at my6sense, a service focused on providing personally relevant items from your social and news streams. It could be assumed some of our services overlap in the public eye.

Last month, I was first to blog on the fun site, CubeDuel, which had you picking between pairs of current or former colleagues, selecting which one you would work with again, in a site that closely resembled the often copied but rarely matched, HotOrNot. Last week, a new site entered the foray, taking similar game mechanics, but aiming to apply them to how well you know people's skills, and seeing where you rank. The idea? Possibly using anonymous references to crowdsource the best people on the Web for corporate roles. mixtent asks simply "where do you stand in your industry?", hoping that your ego will push you to find out just how well you stack up against your peers, and possibly, what this means about you.

With LinkedIn setting the gold standard for online resume hoarding and business network connections, its unsurprising other career-oriented, recommendation flinging sites would start with one's LinkedIn network graph to have you start practicing natural selection in the workplace. But while CubeDuel seemed like a harmless game worth about 5 seconds per choice, mixtent hopes to be more.


Instead of the game starting and ending simply with picking one person versus another in a winner-takes-all battle for cubicle superiority, mixtent asks you to select the best individual dependent on a specific job skill or trait. The site mines your Linkedin profile for keywords, and quickly has you doing battle for the position of best writer, blogger, editor, director, manager or whatever else you want to be when you grow up. Post enough votes, or get voted on enough, and you can see how you rank relative to your peers. There are even global leaderboards and similar rankings just among your connections.



Like most services that dabble in collaborative community voting, the most visible people from external networks perform similarly well on mixtent. For example, the omnipresent Chris Brogan tops both social media and blogging, gaining approval rates (where he was picked over competition) of 96% and 100% respectively. As the site doesn't offer comments, and votes are initially anonymous, there's no insight into the voting, so one's familiar avatar could be all you need to spring to the top.


The site encourages you to participate by locking your own rankings' visibility until you make seven votes in the category to pick others. For example, of you have "Oracle DBA" as one of your traits, you need to pick between 7 pairs of people who is the best Oracle DBA. Then you see if you are at the top, around 60th percentile, or surprisingly lower.



Oddly, at least to me, you can even force open the ranking of another user simply by voting on them the same seven times. Navigate to another user's profile, click an unopened box, and seven votes later, you can see where they stand. I was able to unlock Google's Bob Meese for Business Development and TechCrunch's Mike Arrington on Editing. Theoretically, if one were to hold a grudge against someone, they could pick all the skills and drive them into the mud with a cute 0 for 7 score, but it appears the system anticipates truth-telling.


Initial coverage of mixtent compared the service to another buzz-worthy launch of the last year, at Honestly.com, which was anticipated to provide unvarnished reviews of peers anonymously. (Hence its initial name unvarnished) But mixtent doesn't focus on longform reviews, instead just the raw clicks of the people. Maybe if there is significant volume, you can start to get an idea of who separates themselves as the great from the common, but it's early days. To start adding tallies to the system, head to mixtent.com.

While most of the recent personnel news surrounding Yahoo! has dealt with who has left the company rather than who has joined it, the company is expanding its efforts in communities, social and communications, building out a corporate roster below Carol Bartz that features many former Microsoft and MSN alumni, looking to restore the company to its once lofty leadership position on the Web. Joining the purple people on Monday was Steve Douty, one of the first five employees at Hotmail during the Web 1.0 days, tasked with owning product management as the vice president of communications and communities, including properties such as Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Groups, Flickr and Yahoo! Answers.

Reporting to Bill Shaughnessy, the company's senior VP of global product management, who in turn reports to Blake Irving, Yahoo!'s chief product officer, Douty is responsible for product strategy and roadmap to rollout for the products' current offerings and their future plans, including how they would be monetized.

Like its counterpart at Google, Yahoo! has struggled in some cases about delivering uniformity of product between properties - even while Yahoo! Mail and Flickr especially have maintained top positions in terms of global use. In talking with Douty on Friday, he told me that one thing the company could do a better job with is focusing on integrating these services, and keeping a user longer, aiding them to "go deep into Yahoo and then naturally experience other services in a highly integrated and relevant way", using another Yahoo! property. This hope mirrors a similar challenge experienced by the MSN team during his time there following Microsoft's acquisition of Hotmail at the end of 1997.

Douty, whose Linkedin resume includes stops at Moxie Software and Groopix after Microsoft, joined Hotmail in June of 1996 as the first businessperson at the company, running marketing, product, sales and business development, he said. He recounted to me stories of jump-starting the adoption of free Web-based e-mail through college newspaper advertisements, and making the user experience incredibly simple, including getting a new personal e-mail address within a minute of entering the site and sending a message in the second minute. "In two minutes, you could compose and send a message with your own mail ID," he told me in a face to face meeting last Friday. This led to significant word of mouth for Hotmail that rivaled or even outperformed the service's much-celebrated viral capabilities, including the standard email signature.

Yahoo!'s no upstart, and handful of newspaper ads on college campuses isn't going to turn the trick to get the company back to being recognized as an innovative leader in the Web space. But Douty said he thinks there is significant opportunity for the company to grow from its current position, and capitalize on positions where competitors are not strong.

"There are a lot of incredible assets (at Yahoo!) that have not been adequately stitched and integrated," he told me. "Those assets, combined with a new fresh look on how people use the Internet and interact with others gives everyone an opportunity. There is an opportunity now for a brand-new entrant and a creative set of new offerings for people who are not being served well by anyone today, and Yahoo! is in a position to capitalize on that."

For starters, though Douty is in his first week on the job, it's possible Yahoo! Mail could play a connecting role with the many other services he owns, maybe not as the primary event, but as a conduit to other properties. He recounted Hotmail's challenges with spam, saying Yahoo! and Gmail both do very well at combating spam, and also said Yahoo! Mail is one of the Web's biggest photo properties, simply when photo attachments are included.

Yahoo!'s fight is no longer for search market share against Google. Like Apple's futile OS war against Windows, the time has come to look beyond those initial battles and find new ground to shine. Douty hopes his efforts, and being reunited with many former MSN colleagues, will be key in the company's similar turnaround. Of note, other MSN alumni include both Blake Irving and Bill Shaughnessey as well as John Matheny, the senior vice president of engineering at Yahoo!. With Office and Windows being revenue royalty at Microsoft, MSN never quite got the opportunity to lead in Redmond. In Sunnyvale, Web services are king.

Disclosures: Steve Douty is a director for MenuMax, a Paladin Advisors Group client. He holds the same role for Groopix Inc, a Paladin client in 2009. I am cofounder of Paladin Advisors Group.

Too often, it seems that we are working for the Web instead of it working for us. Piles of RSS feeds, new emails and unread social statuses pile up, trying to take our attention away from the real world. And if we're in the process of catching up in once place, activity that should pique our interest is happening elsewhere. It's enough to wonder how we get anything accomplished, rather than chasing our tails. A new service currently in invite-only beta, is looking to turn things on their head by putting the Web to work - letting you create simple tasks for the system to notify you of relevant events you choose - as they happen.

The idea is simple: "If this, then that." If something being monitored occurs, an action is created. And the site can get especially useful if you tap into its deep repertoire of available options.


At present, If this, then that, or ifttt.com, supports 22 different services and an array of triggers that you can manipulate to gain your attention. For example, you can set up a task that tweets on your behalf when you upload a new photo to Facebook. Simple, right? You can monitor RSS feeds for updates, or watch for tweets from friends of yours that contain specific keywords and get a notice by e-mail, with polls taking place every 15 minutes. It's not quite Pubsubhubbub, but it's not bad either.



Stepping outside the world of social notifications, you can watch the real world - getting a text if the temperature outside drops below 45 degrees, or even getting a phone call if a watched stock ticker goes above or below a number you have selected. It's a lot of fun to consider the possibilities, when the many options are laid out.

If you have access to ifttt.com, creating new triggers for actions is simple. First, choose a trigger channel (like Craigslist, Delicious, Google Reader, or Twitter), choose a specific trigger, fill out trigger fields, if any, and select an action channel to carry out the task. Imagine getting a text message if your favorite blogger wrote a post, or getting a phone call if somebody mentioned your ID on Twitter. It's humorous to get creative.

Most of the individual services have triggers themselves for alerting you to saved searches. But the linkage between all the triggers and their action channels is something that could make ifttt.com useful for somebody tired of searching for answers on the Web who wants the data to be pushed to them automatically. I've got tasks all set to keep me informed without my even searching.

Want to get in on their private beta? Sign in here to get on the list. You can find them on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ifttt.