The first week since our launch was pure madness. We literally read hundreds of reviews and emails from bloggers and users and we are truly overwhelmed with the reactions and thank each and every one of you (including those who are not Spotback die hard fans). Your comments and opinions are the fuel that drives us to make Spotback better.
It is no secret that the Internet is exploding with fresh information. 75,000 new blogs open each day according to David Sifry. While it is true that there are a lot of poor quality information sources, the ones that are good are enough to make processing and filtering impossible for a single human-being. Before the birth of Spotback I was registered to approximately 150 different feeds. These feeds alone injected more than a thousand new stories to my RSS reader each day waiting for me to filter through the mess. It was insane! The fear of losing anything important turned me into a sleepless zombie.
The amount of information is only one aspect of the problem. Here is another: how do you find the best sources in your areas of interest? Do you think that everything is as easy as reading TechCrunch, Om Malik, Scobleizer, eHub, Mashable and a number of other great sources to know what’s going on? Think of people who are interested in, god forbid, things such as arts, health or science. Think of your parents. They have 20 minutes to spend in front of the computer - this machine that everybody tells them is so cool - and they do not know where to start. They probably have Google as their homepage and they just kill time by entering random keywords only to sink a little deeper into the 70 zillion search results they get in 0.02 millisecond.
This brings me to another problem: maybe you, unlike your parents, do know how to get decent results out of search engines, but what about those times when you don’t know what you are looking for? The success of Google (and other major search engines) made us think of search as the ultimate cure for all mankind problems. I seriously believe that there is more depth to people than that - we are far more complex and personality rich than to be happy with search alone.
That said, how does Spotback try to contribute to a better information ecosystem? Spotback was formed around the idea of personalization through rating and interaction. Our technology transforms the power of the community as the most powerful filtering system available anywhere into an instrument that is used to deliver each user in the community better, more personalized content.
Since each person is different and unique he/she should also receive unique personally tailored experience. Each user should receive his/her favorite content based on their personalities and preferences. We are not against the notion of finding the ‘top stories’ in a community with mutual fields of interest. There is no contradiction between that and what Spotback id doing. The two services are simply different, yet important (after all, look at the success of services like Digg which we also frequently visit and like a lot).
News is a great way to utilize our technology (which is not limited to news or to text for that matter). Spotback was designed so that it will build a profile for each user. Our algorithms analyze each user in two main axis’: fields of interest and style (or taste if you will).
I think that an example from everyday life can help. I, for example, read the same two financial newspapers every day. I spend approximately 20 minutes reading them front to back and usually find a few stories that interest me (sometime none). If I had a good friend that knew me very well and knew what I am interested in and maybe what I may be interested in, it would have been great if this friend could make clippings for me from those newspapers and save me the trouble of filtering out the stories that I care very little about from the ones I do care about. Hell! come to think about it, some of us have assistants that do exactly that. Now imagine the same thing but with thousands of the best sources on the Internet in dozens of fields and not only with two newspapers - that’s Spotback mission in a nutshell.
Spotback in the blogsphere (partial list):
TechCrunch and TechCrunch France
Geeking with Greg
Mashable!
fluxam
Frontiering Talk
str1ke
