BloGiza

Time to Headup

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce what I believe will this year’s insanely nifty Internet development – Headup.

So, what is Headup? Headup brings a bottom-up Semantic Web approach to discovering and organizing information on the Internet. Translated into English, Headup is a browser add-on (currently for Firefox) which understands the context of information on a Web page and automatically fetches a wide variety of additional relevant information. Better yet, it finds information that is relevant to a specific user based on his/her social graph.

What Headup does is:

1. Finds information that you might not discover yourself
2. Saves time and effort by enriching your surfing and searching
3. Does all this while still protecting your privacy

The technology behind Headup connects data sources on the Web, be they news sites, blogs, photo- and video-sharing sites, and social networking services in a semantic, contextualized way and start making smart connections between them.

For example, the technology recognizes that “Joy Division” when you are looking at Amazon’s music section is the same Joy Division on Wikipedia, YouTube, Last.fm, and your friends’ “Favorite Music” section on their Facebook profile. It then aggregates all this information and presents it to you in a useful interface that doesn’t take you away from the original page you started with.

(Click images for larger view)

 

The service is incredibly useful in a number of ways. It makes connections and finds information that you wouldn’t necessarily come across by yourself. I find that by headupping my Facebook friends, I often find blog postings and information about them that isn’t in their profile, not to mention shared interests that we have and upcoming events.

It also automatically enriches search results. When you google something, the search results automatically come back with a headuppable link. The Headup link saves you many next steps that you would automatically take, by bringing you the relevant search results, blog posts, and pictures.

Throughout it all, Headup is watching out for your privacy. Your personal information is stored locally, on your computer. The Headup servers do not store any personal data.

Headup has been developed by SemantiNet, one of Giza’s promising Internet portfolio companies. Although the application is currently only available as a Firefox add-on, it will soon be available for other browsers and a client-less version of the technology is on its way as well.

The application is in open beta and I strongly recommend everybody try it out. Let us know what you think.

Many Communication Options = Worse Communication?

Over the last couple of months, I have developed a growing addiction to social media. Where a year ago my main channel for interaction with friends was email, followed by email and Facebook, nowadays it increasingly includes Twitter and shared links via RSS readers. Not to mention FriendFeed, which is a mélange of everything else.

However, no real framework governs all these tools. Some people you contact via email, some people you send messages to in Facebook, some people you tweet. Some people you talk to across multiple channels oftentime continuing a conversation across multiple platforms.

Which is all great in theory – more ways to communicate between people should lead to more and better communications. Except that I’m beginning to think this isn’t actually the case.

I’ve had a couple of examples in recent weeks where I’ve contacted someone on Facebook regarding some issue fully expecting the person to respond via Facebook. Except that the person doesn’t respond until days later and I realize I should have actually emailed (or, heaven’s forbid, phoned) them. 

Or, I find myself having running conversations with people via tweets and private messages on Twitter. Except that Twitter was never built to be an effective tool for two-way conversations and eventually the whole exercise gets so frustrating that I go back to email.

The explosion of social media choices does provide us with a lot more options for communications. But lacking a good framework for organizing and keeping track of these conversations, it mainly seems to increase the noise.