A guest post from THE man behind CircleMe http://su.pr/1NzYef Making Web Content Relevant: CircleMe
Guest post from Giuseppe D’Antonio / CircleMe
Building on the Social Web
A few months ago, I embarked in a project which has become more and more engaging and exciting as the weeks progress. With my partner Erik Lumer, we have been working hard in the development and distribution of a product called CircleMe, which Saul quickly spotted on his radar just less than a month from our public release, on October 4th, 2011. Our vision with CircleMe is to create an online environment where users can take advantage of technology and the social web to enjoy more their passions and interests in life (i.e., their “likes”).
Social Graph Power
The way we want to achieve this is by asking users to “connect” to the things and topics they love, and then CircleMe will leverage clever algorithms along with the power of the social graph to surface relevant content and new items tailored to each user. To get there, we need to move gradually. The first step has been to create an engaging environment where users can easily express all their ‘likes’ and discover (in a serendipic way) new things of potential interest. Then, as activity increases, we will have enough data to reach the goal to surface relevant content in a timely fashion for any interested user.
OsakaBentures Access
If you would be interested to give CircleMe a try, feel free to click on this link to get granted access to the system. We hope you will find the CircleMe experience unique, engaging and useful.
Instant Access (no invite needed): Just for OsakaBentures Readers
Of course the project is quite ambitious, but with a strong team behind it and a gradual approach, we have already seen good progress in these seven weeks since launch.
CircleMe Bookmarklet and Public Item Pages
And today we are releasing two key features which I believe will continue to improve the overall offering of CircleMe: the “CircleMe Bookmarklet” and the “Public Item Pages”. Below you will find some details with a quick & dirty video tutorial that will show you how to take advantage of our “CircleMe Bookmarklet” feature.
I am certain that in the future more and more we will all need to easily access personalized and relevant content, easily filtering out the rest; even today we are often overwhelmed by the content we are able to access (in ‘push’ or ‘pull’ modality). We are working hard in combining sophisticated recommendation technologies with social curation logics so that relevant content can reach users when most appropriate. As the months go by, we hope to be able to deliver on this promise, while offering a fun and engaging experience to our user base.
The CircleIt! Button (our bookMarklet): with the CircleMe bookmarklet, any CircleMe user will be able to “carry” CircleMe functionality with them across the web. The bookmarklet is easily installed on the browser and allows any user to interact with web content at the time of consumption, by making an association with CircleMe content. With the bookmarklet, a user can create a new “like” in CircleMe, related to the item that is being discussed in that specific page visited. The user can also create a ‘CircleMe story‘ by quickly associating this page URL to the CircleMe item that is most appropriate for this story; finally, the app allows to create a “to do” activity (i.e., bookmarks something so the user can put it in a list of things to get done) related to the specific thing being read about. [Example: the user is on a news site, and reads an article of Bruce Springsteen's next concert in London. She clicks on the CircleMe bookmarklet, identifies Springsteen's item that she likes, and associates a Story and a "To-Do" to this item, triggering the creation of a task to complete in relation to the singer coming into town.
Public Item Pages: from today, all items in CircleMe, which are the content cards that the users connect to (expressing a transparent "interest" for them) are public to access. The total number of items is close to 1 million. This way, all these items will also be accessible by users not yet signed in CircleMe. Any internet-user will be able to see the details related to the item, including picture, description, comments, associated stories related to the item. While we hope that many more users will sign-up after seeing the interesting content shared in CircleMe, this way any internet citizen can take a peak at what is inside CircleMe.
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