There is, undoubtedly, a lot of rubbish online and sites like Del.icio.us, Digg and hundreds of others have tried to make finding the cool stuff easier. The basic idea has been to use user generated recommendations, submissions and voting to help highlight what’s interesting.
Popego takes things in a slightly different direction with what they call an ‘interest platform’ – delivering new content for you to check out based on the interests displayed in your existing social profiles and online activities.
When you create an account on Popego you’ll be asked to provide your username for the social sites that you use – from your use of these sites Popego will automatically generate what they call an interest profile. For example, if you use Del.icio.us to bookmark pages about sports, Popego will assume you’d like to see more content about sports in the future.
After you’ve tweeked your profile, you’ll receive an ‘interest feed’ of relevant content matched to your profile. You can interact with the feed and let it know what items you are actually interested in – helping the site learn what really floats your boat.
Popego is certainly a slick implementation of a sound idea – helping people find cool stuff and collate multiple incarnations of their online personas (a la Friendfeed) – all based on existing social media profiles and activities.
The company sees the idea of interests and ‘interest-based’ applications as integral to the future of the finding online content. In their model, the volume of noise online will lead to applications that help the internet ‘know us’ – informed by our activities online, delivering what we do want to see and filtering out the rest.
So will it work? The questions raised by some of the panelists in the video above (Techcrunch 50 Conference 2008) more or less sum up the challenges Popego faces – mass adoption and competing features from more established sites being two.
In short, it’s certainly a punt – but it’s a very well-executed and interesting punt.
Site: www.popego.com
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