Sustaining a successful social sharing product with a small array of features is a challenge. For every success story like Pinterest, there are dozens more that have tried to gain traction, and, while possibly succeeding to a small degree, not seeing enough activity to convert into a healthy business. One of the more recent to close its doors is Amplify.com, which acted as a home for users to clip favorite sites from the web (including on mobile) and add their own commentary. This simple and somewhat elegant service played a role as a curation journal of sorts for its users, who could discuss an article (or its best parts anyway) downstream. But news came this week the site is being mothballed, and users are being pointed to Clipboard instead.

While the gesture to Clipboard comes as some relief for Amplify's users, it's not expected to be a catch-all for existing clips that have been captured over the last few years. A blog post announcing the move says "We can't guarantee that all of your clips will be preserved", although databases will be transferred, and it's hoped a migration is possible. Of note, Clipboard, run by former Microsofties, has garnered praise of late from Michael Arrington and GeekWire.



While Amplify's note to users was short, Clipboard says Amplify "struggled for some time to continue operating. The reasons why are difficult to state, but ultimately neither service was meeting the needs of their user."

One user, Paul Simbeck-Hampson, wrote in detail on Google+, that Amplify "was a community of thoughtful considerate people who took time to engage, share and support one another around topics that were meaningful - it was like a grown ups meeting place," adding that even while discussions on curation and copyright flared up, Amplify made many changes to be on the right side of content owners.

Unfortunately, that effort looks not to have been enough. I appreciated the Amplify bookmarklet, especially on mobile, and think that sharing selectively on the web, having a discussion downstream with peers, is valuable - but this particular service didn't survive. You can see more on the Amplify site or on the Clipboard blog.

Disclosure: I work at Google on the Google+ team. Any conjecture as to whether this is good or bad for Google+ is trying too hard. :)

There's no question more people are on the Web, consuming greater amounts of content, sharing more and expanding their networks online. Social networking has eclipsed previous web pasttimes, including email and porn, in sheer use. As many different activities become social, different services have emerged to center around specific niche activity - for example, Foursquare for location sharing and discovery, Last.fm for music listening and artist discovery, and at least for a while, Blippy, which tracked my spending habits.

As an early adopter and one who likes sharing, I've embraced practically all these sites. I enjoy sharing and learning from the community, finding friends and shared interests. I like that I can explicitly use my NOOKColor to tell you I finished a book. I like that I can explicitly use Spotify to share playlists and my favorite tunes of the day, and I like that I can explicitly share from Google Reader to bring you the best from the Web I am reading. The human element, I believe, is an important one, where I signal to you what I find most valuable of all these things - what I have hand-selected for you and you specifically, to know.

There are two defining attributes of the services I've mentioned that I think are critical to enabling a positive user experience. The first is that the users who I am sharing with know just what they are getting into. They joined Foursquare to follow location updates. They joined Blippy to see purchases. They joined Last.fm to see music plays. The second, if the site is more of an aggregator, like FriendFeed in its heyday for example, is that filters exist, so I can avoid seeing your tweets, or your Foursquare updates, or your Flickr photos. Both of these ensure that the user, as the consumer, maintains control over what content they see and the publisher has a choice as to what they publish.

There is value in explicit sharing with selective audiences. There is value in the audience anticipating what they will see when they choose to connect with you, and in you having the opportunity to share what you want, when you want - an inherent, unwritten, contract, that if you violate by sharing too much, too often, or too off-topic, means your connection can be broken.

Spending a lot of time listening to mainstream social networkers, such as my wife, who is not quite as embedded as I am, I hear a lot about the minutiae of people's lives that go into these networks, and the resulting annoyances about such updates. Initial responses to sites like Twitter or Foursquare was typically skeptical, in terms of why people would want the small updates, seemingly unfiltered. Obviously, as both services have reached a good level of traction, thanks in part to power users and casual alike, there is some value to microsharing, and some are on the services constantly. But quality and filtering adds value - something I've obviously been focused on with my work at my6sense and constant testing of new products to make our social networking even smarter.

Sharing is going up. This is fantastic. Enabling more apps to share and people to connect is great too. But I hope quality and curation don't fall by the wayside.

Tonight's news of Gmail taking on information overload directly, using a combination of intelligent algorithms and your own feedback to build in box personalization is yet another hallmark move to taking on the increasing deluge of content approaching us from all directions - be it our e-mail, static Web pages, audio and video, or the many different social streams which we have subscribed to. There is no question that content creation and sharing is exploding and people are completely incapable of giving every single message and item their full attention. And many smart folks are looking to bring solutions to find the best and ignore the rest.

As I see it, there are five major ways companies and individuals take on the topic of relevance.

1. Editorial Filtering

Loose definition: I am the smartest person. I know best for you, and I deserve to decide for you what is the most important.

Example: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN and most mainstream media outlets today, who for years have been trusted arbiters to find the most important news and bring it to us in the way that they decide.

New media examples: The Drudge Report, which has grown from one man's curation and sorting to a full team, and Techmeme, which was once almost completely algorithm driven, and now is staffed around the clock by savvy editors who pluck the best of the tech Web.

Of course, it is easy for an individual to be a curator. I share a lot of content, manually, through @lgstream on Twitter, as well as on Google Buzz, FriendFeed and Facebook.

2. Global Popularity Filtering

Loose definition: The will of the people can be trusted, and they will decide what is most important, thanks to the most votes.

Examples: American Idol, Digg and Reddit. He with the most votes wins and gains a coveted front page slot.

New media example: Twitter Trending Topics display the most frequent topics and hashtags, not necessarily the most important. Also, you can see tools like Tweetmeme and FavStar which watch for number-driven popularity online.

This would also have included RSS shared items counters of the past, such as RSSmeme and ReadBurner.

3. Social Filtering

Loose definition: What your friends like, you will like. If it's important to them, it's important to you.

New Media Examples: Facebook recommended friends and pages, which display how many friends like them, Google Social Search, which pulls results from your friends content, and FriendFeed Best of Day, which shows the items from your friends that gained the most activity over a time period.

4. Explicit Personalization

Loose definition: You told us what you like or don't like, and since you know yourself best, you know what's important.

New media examples: Netflix's star ratings and TiVo's Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down feedback mechanisms, as well as Kosmix's MeeHive project.

5. Implicit Personalization

Loose definition: Just be yourself. Read what you want, do what you want, and the system will learn from you, continuously updating.

Examples: Amazon.com, my6sense.

There is a time and place for practically all types of filtering. Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits today talked about the serendipity algorithm and what it means to marketers looking to leverage machine learning. With Gmail's announcement, ReadWriteWeb's recent coverage of TrapIt and ChatterApp in an article on consumer information overload, and the high visibility of Facebook's News Feed, against the recent feed, the challenge has grown to a level where you no longer have to convince people there is a problem in filtering, but instead, you need to make a concrete decision as to how to approach that problem.

I believe that there is a role for trusted curators of news, people who have unique access or unique insight, who can get to news more quickly than anybody else, or dive into it more deeply. I believe that social similarities are a good hint at an individual's interests, but they cannot replace your own preferences - which go beyond your ability to fill out a form and try to tell the truth on what it is that you really like. The best systems, as Gmail is trying to do (with some help from your own feedback on whether they are getting it right), happen naturally and transparently in the background.

It's natural I would think this given my work with my6sense, but I have long believed in there being a perfect place for humans to act as curators and guides, while there is another perfect place for machines to provide, to the best of their ability, resources to aid your discovery. So when you are challenged with a mountain of information coming at you from any angle, think of the best way to get it handled. Should you turn to an editor, to the will of the people, to your friends, or to code? The options are all there, and more tools are coming to help you attack the noise - because there's little chance it will fade away any time soon - and a very strong chance it could get much worse very quickly.

Disclosures: I am vice president of marketing at my6sense. ChatterApp and TrapIt are assumed competition. In addition, Kosmix.com is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am a co-founder. I was also previously an advisor to ReadBurner, since closed.

At the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco event Wednesday, Echo's Khris Loux sat down with me and representatives from UltraKnowledge, CBS Interactive (formerly CNET) and CNN.com to discuss the rise of citizen journalism and social media, intertwined with traditional journalism, and how mainstream media outlets can adapt their practices to include curation as part of their offerings. Our panel's determination could be summarized as saying the ability for the public to launch stories and extend storylines related to realtime has removed the ability for mainstream media to be gatekeepers, furthering the need to accurately determine authenticity and truth. And where mainstream media cannot have exceptional access, be it to geography, sources or timing, part of their new role is to discover and highlight high quality content, regardless of its source, in effect, adopting the role of curator.

Best exemplified by CNN.com's iReport, citizen journalists are being given a chance to report on equal footing with the mainstream media. While iReport gives these would-be reporters a place to piggyback on a major brand, many others have taken to their own blogs, social networks or Twitter to report live, and unlike the traditional approach where media authors would issue a story and call it a day, the life of a story now often starts when it hits the Web, spawning comments, shares and retweets. But as citizen journalists and bloggers are given the same capability to gain visibility, mainstream media's much-celebrated structure to put articles and stories through the vetting process sometimes falls astray in the race to get the story out quickly.

A little over two years ago, I highlighted how quickly incorrect news can spread in the age of microblogging. (See: Smart People, Stupid Tweets. Fake News Spreads Fast on Twitter.) While many of us know not to believe everything on the Web, even if it is in Wikipedia, there remains a need to separate fact from fiction. With so many publications out there reporting on the same information at the same time, without having additional insight, the task of curating the very best of the analysis and repeaters can become a very serious task.

In January, I broached this issue, asking, "Can You Filter for Quality News Amidst Instant Analysis?" and earlier still, in December, highlighting how some news organizations are in fact incentivized for behavior which may lead away from taking the extra effort sometimes required to get the story right. (See: Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don't Address Incentives)

As excited and promotional as I am about the ability for anyone to create and share content, I am equally worried that incentives to promote the discovery of accuracy are not clearly defined, and it is often very difficult to find a real authority on a given topic in a world of instant analysis. When a story breaks in a real-time platform, like Twitter, the person who first reported the earthquake, or was present on the scene of an event, is only an expert for a short time, and when that topic has faded, new influencers for new stories are needed. This leads to a need for trusted sources to harness the truth from the originator of news, wherever it may be, mass media or citizen journalism, and rapidly verify accuracy.

But the sheer volume of feedback can overwhelm even the most well-intended. CNN.com reported one recent popular article achieved more than 30,000 comments - a practical impossibility to moderate by humans, leading to the desire to somehow separate the wheat from the chaff and surface the most accurate and supported insight. As one knows, trusting the community is possible, but usually results in an across the board maligning of those who share opposing views. See any political blog or sports blog for this particular variety of trench warfare. See any comment stream on Yahoo! News or on YouTube to see the quality of the masses at work.

The answer lies in finding a way to reward the truth-seekers in the real-time Web, and to reward media, be they an established brand or an emerging one, for discovering accurate insights, or simply harnessing them. The world of real-time storytelling is evolving before our eyes, and in some cases, its sheer ephemeral nature promises to introduce as many issues as it solves. We, as readers, creators and sharers, should be working diligently to keep our streams clean and provide value to all those who come in contact with our content.

For more thoughts, see Echo's essay: Real-time Storytelling

With so much data being created online from so many different sources, human curators are becoming increasingly important - separating high quality content from low quality content, and becoming trusted sources of data for the extended social graph. At the beginning of June, I gained the opportunity to talk with Ed Callan on the topic of curation, and how I go use many different services online, from Google Reader, FriendFeed, Delicious, Twitter and Facebook, to other tools, including my6sense and CinchCast. The extended interview is very detailed and explains, in near entirety, how I interact with the Web each day.

While the topic is curation, Ed and I expand well beyond the core, and into more biographical detail, and the psychology of social media users. I hope you find it of value.

Of note: The call was part of a one-hour paid engagement unrelated to any company I advise or my core job at Paladin. My6sense, a Paladin client, is highlighted, thanks to the topic of the call. I did not know the call was being recorded, but as it is, I am sharing.

The full interview is available below:

With the world of Web pages turning to a Web of streams, there becomes a battle to find value in those streams and capture points in time, sharing with your social graph. Between the medium of full-length blogging and more instantaneous tweeting or status updates is forming a lightweight medium, featuring products like Tumblr, Posterous and an intriguing entrant, Amplify, which is built to let its members post short updates, engage with the community and more importantly, clip favorite pages or Web sites along the way for discussion. Showing steady traffic and user growth over the last year, Amplify is now branching out to mobile devices with a mobile bookmarklet, letting you post updates from your iPhone, iPad or Android handset.


One of the biggest drawbacks of surfing the Web on an iPad for me is the consistent reminder that its user agent tells downstream sites that it is a mobile device, and not a full-fledged computer, bringing me mobile versions of favorites like Google Reader and Twitter, for instance. Similarly, some site's widgets and bookmarklets don't behave in a standard way. But Amplify's new code is built to take advantage of the new world of advanced mobile devices and touch screens.


   
Using Amplify Mobile to Share a Link to Sports Blog Nation

If you go to http://amplify.com/m-bookmarklet, being rolled out this morning, you can now clip and share pages and posts you find interesting and share them downstream from your mobile device. It's not the most advanced technology I've ever seen, but it absolutely works. Just add a JavaScript bookmarklet to your browser, and tap it when you come across something interesting.

As with other Bookmarklet-driven services, Amplify offers you the option to share the URL and make notes about that share, which are added to your dedicated page. For example, my own feed is here: http://louisgray.amplify.com/. You can also "clip" from the shared page, which grabs not just selected text, but even graphics included, just as if you had clipped a newspaper or magazine article - which is very nice.


   
Clipping Twitter's Blog Post And Selecting Text on Amplify

For example, last night, when I shared Twitter's latest post about uptime struggles on Amplify Mobile, I was prompted to clip the article, tapped twice with my finger on paragraphs I wanted to include, and Amplify went above the call of duty to include the links to the company's Status blog and @Support. The resulting share (here) is displayed elegantly and captures downstream impact of likes, comments and retweets from the community.


Amplify's mobile solution doesn't have to be a dedicated iPhone or Android app - and mobile clipping promises to be the beginning of their off-desktop strategy. But it absolutely works great, and it seems they have an engaged community looking to see what you share. If you're an active bookmarker on Delicious, or have previously enjoyed using Bookmarklets on FriendFeed and other services, Amplify is very interesting indeed. You can of course connect to your extended social graph from Twitter and Facebook, so make sure you're not Amplifying the news alone. I'm here: http://louisgray.amplify.com/.

Before there was social networking as we know it today, and before blogs, there were flat home pages. Among the first things most of us would do with these flat personal home pages would be to compile a list of links - essentially an extension of our browser bookmarks - so that our friends and other Web visitors would find out what we like, or possibly, so we could demonstrate an expertise. Now, as we have moved to a real-time Web built as much on streams as on pages, our sharing has sped up and many people are talking about the discovery and highlighting of key content as curation. New word... same idea.

Good curation tools are hard to find, though I have seen a number of attempts to get the formula right - and much of the fault lies with gaps in today's search engines, who are increasingly favoring most recent content over most exact content. Into the void comes Symbaloo, a company that is taking a new spin on personalized link pages, or start pages, and creating what are called "Web Mixes", with core components being tiles (much like bookmarks), RSS feeds and rich media, which can be used to capture the day's news - but more importantly serve to be a page of record for a topic or a time.

Symbaloo, a Dutch company, which has already enjoyed strong success in some areas of Europe, is today opening up to US customers in an early beta. With roots deep in the Continent, they are unapologetic about taking baby steps to serve us on the mainland, but they are eager to make a dent here as well.


Symbaloo's main design features 52 tiles, laid out in a 6 x 10 rectangular grid, with the center area reserved to display selected RSS feeds or to search the Web with any of the pre-loaded search engines. Whatever you choose to do with those 52 available tiles is up to you - and you can share any custom Webmix you build with your friends downstream, highlighting the curation you have done.


For example, given my interest in Web services and early adoption, I put together a list of 50 top startups, excluding the "wise beyond their years" examples of Facebook, Twitter and other large private companies, and then ordered these 50 from 1-50 in terms of potential impact and visibility, starting with Foursquare and ending with Fabulis. As you can see, the "50 Top Startups" Webmix displays high quality graphics for each tile and is visually appealing.

http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/50-top-startups

Similarly, I also chose to take a few minutes and display 50 core Web sites you probably visit often, all in one place:

http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/50-core-web-sites


Creating your own Webmixes is very easy. After logging in, hit the + sign to create a new Webmix, and then click a tile where you want to add a link. If the link you are looking to add already exists, just click to add it to your Webmix. If it doesn't, then you can create it using an image from your computer, or one of the many standard icons provided by Symbaloo.

If you have a field of expertise, and want to share your findings, or your sources of data, with the world, Symbaloo's Webmix approach packs a lot of links into a single graphically pleasing page. I would expect you could rapidly see topical pages built for everything from Sports to Business to History. I could see Webmixes being created not just by technology curators like me, but also by teachers and journalists working stories.

For many, Symbaloo's approach may be compelling enough for them to use as their new browser start page, but for most of us, we have already edited our portals and are pretty set with what we want to see the first time we open up the Web. Instead, I think the opportunity to curate the Web and share with friends what we know is going to be the biggest opportunity. I expect to leverage Symbaloo as a one-stop personal portal, which I can get to from my desktop, iPad or any other mobile device. You can start making your Webmixes at http://www.symbaloo.com.

Disclosure: Symbaloo is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media.

The issue of real-time news reporting and curation is becoming increasingly visible and important as news breaks on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media properties. Tonight, Chris Saad and I talked about how the mainstream media can adapt to involve content curation in addition to their content creation, and how it still makes sense to have some investigative reporting in addition to real-time reactions.

The discussion weaved from curation tools like Cascaad and my6sense to the recent news of Teens In Tech Networks CEO Daniel Brusilovsky leaving TechCrunch, and how the news was interpreted.

Original Post Here: ET Conversations

Listen in below:


Disclosures: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. In addition, I am an advisor to Teens In Tech Networks.