A synaptic GUI

Perhaps I’m a bit crazy to name this creation a synaptic autocomplete, in reality it’s more of a real-time reinforcement learning autocomplete, but that just doesn’t quite have the same zing to it if you catch my drift. So let’s stick with synaptic because it fulfills the most basic of requirements – implicit real-time connections.

Don’t worry, we’re not throwing this technology away, fancy user interfaces are just the first application.

I took the example screenshot this morning while sharing a wonderful story about Google Wave beating all communications competition into submission hands down. It’s obvious there’s still a lot of work to be done on the feature before it will be available to the broad public, but the basic premise is there.

And it works! I just love using it! Hell, it’s already increased my probability of sharing/bookmarking an article at least ten-fold.

But what does it really do?

Well the algorithms take quite a lot of whiteboard space to explain in their full nerdical glory so I won’t go into too much detail. Basically what happens is that the software scrobbles my Delicious account to learn about my preferences and usage history. Then whenever I tag a story with my personal vocabulary it connects those keywords with whatever different semantic API‘s (Zemanta, Textwise, Enrycher) said about the website.

All of this happens in real-time, apart from the scrobbling of course.

Then the very next time I’m tagging a similar story the suggestions and connections are already there and bloody awesome, if I do say so myself. One example from a few days ago I remember is tagging a question on StackOverflow as “help” and ten seconds later when I was tagging a different question it suggested I use the keyword “help”.

Don’t you just love it when stuff like that happens?

This entry was written by swizec, posted on January 19, 2010 at 10:20 am, filed under Cool Tools, Synaptic web and tagged Add new tag, Application programming interface, Business, Delicious, googlewave, Operating Systems, Real-time computing, Realtime, Tools, Twitter.
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iPhone application "my6sense" for the discoverer in you

Image via CrunchBase

So what do you get when you take some AI, all your social and RSS streams and combine it together. Well you get this mobile application for iPhone that shows you only the cool and interesting things you want to read.

First you go to the app store and get the “my6sense” app on your iPhone, well yes it is only for the iPhone at the moment. Then you make your account and start linking your social streams and import your Google Reader stream. All nice and fine with a quick import, only takes a few minutes to parse through hundreds of feeds as it only catches the titles I presume.

Then you start using the application, it ranks your reading material so that the one that is more important to you is at the top and it adapts based on what you click and what you don’t read. It states it takes a few times before it catches on your trends. That is quite common as we all know that the algorithms need initial data to be able to suggest things. It also gives you this visual bar from hot to cold depending on how “smart” the application is in showing you the posts.

Overall it is a nice application, but it is only targeted on the mobile market and I also need to remember what I already read for when I get back to the computer and find myself back in the normal flow of the day. A web based solution would be a way to go, well we’ll see to that at a later time.

It is an initial path that uses the synaptic web and connections that are opening around us with all the information that we have. We can predict to see many new adoptions and resolutions of these kinds of application in the next year.

As such we wish everyone a high productive year and exciting new opportunities in 2010!

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This entry was written by Peter Čuhalev, posted on December 30, 2009 at 11:20 am, filed under Cool Tools and tagged Add new tag, Google Reader, iPhone, my6sense, RSS, Smartphones.
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