Finding What You Care About…

and having what you care about find you

The information we consume on a daily basis can be safely grouped into two categories: expected information, and unexpected information.

Expected information comes from sources we regularly access for new content: stock charts, RSS feeds, blogs, etc. Unexpected information on the other hand, is information you don’t know you care about until it reaches you, for example: a bad accident on your route home, those new golf clubs you want finally being on sale, or even an unexpected spike in website traffic.

For expected information, technologies like Flipboard, an aggregated RSS stream — are currently leading the way in bridging some of the gaps in our current information experience. By providing a single list of content merged from multiple sources into a consistent format, users are no longer required to go to each source of information to browse content. Instead a new streamlined process brings all the information to them on a single screen.

Where unexpected information is concerned, Google Now is trying to provide users with a similar streamlined process — but they take into account things like recent searches, calender events and any other relevant Google services that apply to the end user right now. Suddenly your mobile device is warning you to catch an earlier bus due to delays, or informing you of an updated flight departure time.

Although both of these services are pioneering the next generation of user information experience, they are not without flaws and limitations. Flipboard is a very static service in terms of personalization; You can customize the sources of your content, but the content is never personalized to you — that is, it doesn’t learn from the posts you’ve chosen to read and not read. Google Now on the other hand provides no customization, but has scarily intuitive personalization that only improves over time — under the caveat that the information you care about exists within the confines of a Google service.

When we started designing Dashbook, we knew that people wanted unbounded and effortless access to all their information, and we knew they wanted it in an adaptive, and auto-personalizing way like Google Now — but we could also see the near endless obstacles of combining these two ideas into a cohesive platform. Considering that platforms are merely a reflection of the data they provide; This effectively makes Instagram a collection of photos, Twitter a collection of text snippets — and would make Dashbook a collection of the entire Internet. This raised an impossible, yet unavoidably interesting question: If you could see the entire Internet, all the time — of all that information, what would you choose to display on one screen? What would it really take to provide each and every person with their own personal view of the Internet? One that had been automatically and effortlessly curated just for them?