The creators of Social Collider describe that they build the service “With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.”

It’s easy to use the service: Enter a keyword, choose search from “user”, “phrase” or “trends”, select the length of the history from one day to one month and hit the “collide!”-button. A blank grid opens, like shown in the picture above. Then, slowly, the chart gets dotted while the service is processing the data. The dots represent post, they are seperated horizontal with a column for each user. On the left side is the selected timeline, starting with the actual date on top. It’s fun to watch the number of dots growing over the chart. The Posts are connected with line so the flow of the conversation is visible and these connections organically grew from one post to another.

That’s really nice. But I would like to see some functions to digg deeper and easier into the data. Sorry for this, but the processed information is not very useful. The first thing I would invent is a button do “deactivate” the growing connections between posts. A simple static view does the same and is faster. I would like to see the reply posts between users with a dropdown to define “friends” from two to ten replies as a minimum criteria. The visualisation of this data should show the numbers of relevant posts between users (or what we’ve defined as “friends”). The last function is a dropdown to select the actual number of followers in steps of thousands. This criteria is important in correlation to the number of replies a user sends a “friend”. With this options this tool would compute the real social collusion!

Social Collider is a great example of state-of-the-art infodesign using real time web technology. The layout is perfect, the colors are well chosen, tooltips with message include a change of the grid in the background. Really good work from the design point of view. Kudos!

A feed reader assistant

When you are following hundreds of feeds, there are a lot of informations you probably never want to read, because you are only interested in some of them. The oportunity of Google Reader: Provide a service, which automatically sets posts to read and only leave the relevant posts marked as unread.

How does it work?

Fist I have to point out, that an opt-in solution (like a spam-filter) won’t work for me. The reason is: Newsfeeds are about information I want to see. Usually I don’t know which information is relevant until I read the caption and the first lines. With opt-in any corresponding information will be bannend as soon as I checked it as unwanted, without really knowing whats going on. Thats not what I need, I want intelligent filters. An opt-out solution with user request would be much better, because it does only what I had determinded and known. I would interact with the system and control the flow of information manually.

Tweak the assistant

Now Google Reader has to know, which information is important for me. There is the classic RSS reader view. Each post has a button to set all similar posts as read. When I click on this button, a small window pops up and shows me the similar posts, each with caption and some lines of content. While this sounds to be something like a spam filter, it’s different: It’s not only about the words, its about the root of information too. With root of information I mean the original post and therefrom aggregated information. If I’m not interested in particular information, I’m not interested in informations gathering around it. That’s imporant when you are reading multiple feeds of one branch.

Intelligent sets

The advanced link from website content to feeds. The usability is similar to bookmarking services like delicious. Open a website, select important parts of the content with the mouse. Start the Google Reader plugin which automatically puts URL, page title and selected content into the form. Now there are some field for tags and categories plus a date picker to select a specific date or a period of time. Saving this file adds a ‘intelligent set’ into my Goodle Reader. The assistant now knows, which information is important for me. If posts match this criteria, the reader shows them as important.

The opportunities

A Google Reader with information assistant would be great! The real power comes from the intelligent sets: Imagine Google Reader showing information about other feeds and websites matching the criteria. Imagine Google Reader reminding me about specific information at a date I had selected, showing me todays feeds and websites matching the criteria. Think about automatic information updates after a period ot time. I would pay for this and I’m shure that a lot of people will do.