On Social Networks and Attention Services

Meta-services can be extremely useful in helping us understand what the rest of the world (or some substantial slice thereof) is paying attention to. But for that very reason they don't function as truly personalized news discovery and recommendation services--our individual interests are too idiosyncratic to be fulfilled by aggregated recommendations derived from a mass audience. What we need are services that allow us to determine whose recommendations are meaningful to us in different contexts or at different times.

Looking over the landscape of existing meta-services, Fred Wilson is pretty dissatisfied with his news discovery and recommdation systems and asks Is Meta Better?

...Does aggregating lots of content and audience produce a better result? Than what?

I am not entirely sure. I've gone through my digg phase, my memeorandum phase, and I am back to using myyahoo and the New York Times. In the first case, I am using my own choices of what's important to me. In the second case, I am using the editorial judgement of the New York TImes. Neither of those is very good either. I have to manually change myyahoo and that takes work. The New York Times represents an editorial view that is by no means perfect for me. Plus I don't like to be told what to think by any company or institution.

I am wondering if social networking is the answer. I find that my family, friends, colleagues, and readers emailing me links, tagging them for me in delicious, and leaving them in the comments is the single most useful way to stay on top of what's important.

If you look at the bottom of the left sidebar, you'll see that there is the beginnings of a social network, like those that exist on myspace and friendster, developing around this blog. If there was a way to apply that network, my network, to news and information, that would create the "meta" service I would love.

I've got it already, but it's fragmented, in my email, in delicious, on this blog. Using my social network to aggregate this info, Digg style, seems like a great idea.

Bingo. We need attention services that will allow all of us to receive recommendations based on our unique social networks. These services should minimize the effort required of the people in our networks--so they don't have to email us, tag things for us, or comment on our blogs. The recommendations should essentially be inferred by the relationships and shared interests that exist among the network.

And these services should minimize the effort required of us to gather, analyze and act upon recommendations. We shouldn't have to go from one application to another to make it all work.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data fred+wilson