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Swarrm Dishes Social News Recommendations (The Startup Review)August 28th, 2008 at 5:35 pmSource:Mashable! While Bloomberg News takes a good amount of flack for yapping about a stone-cold Steve Jobs when it’s well known that the man’s blood is still rich and warm, another bigwig of the tech realm, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked with the publication’s reporters Peter Cook and Crayton Harrison about his company’s fascination with Yahoo and the movements the two will make in the next 60 days. As Schmidt explains, Google “will proceed with the agreement by early October.” The company’s reasoning is stated equally simply. In reference to the U.S. Justice Department’s interest in peering into the proposed Google-Yahoo search advertisement deal, which the two tested to the DOJ’s very vocal irritation, Schmidt said, “We are in the process of talking to the government. They’ve not indicated one way or the other how they’re dealing with us.” Indeed, the logic is very elementary. “Hey DOJ, while you’re there giving what we see as your silent treatment, we’re going to go ahead and start making more money, m’kay? Kay.” Naturally, Schmidt isn’t totally gung-ho with an eye on its October non-surprise. “We always worry a little bit, but we think our arguments are pretty strong,” is his response to judicial qualms over what some consider possibly imperialist tendencies by the “Mad Men” of Mountain View. My take on this refresh of the dispute? Business is business, and if Google manages to pass go, well, who’s to say no. Chances are DOJ won’t remain silent ‘til the autumn push, though. If anything, this is a straight reminder sent the way of regulators to recall that the matter has yet to be resolved completely. In a manner of speaking: Get to it, guv’nors. —Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Yahoo-Google Deal Looking Good; Common Sense Packs Up And LeavesYahoo May Consider Letting Google Handle Paid SearchYahoo Math: $800 Million > $12 BillionPushed By Icahn, Yahoo Jumps Back Into Ad Deal With Google?Yahoo Starts Layoffs While Deciding What To Do NextYahoo Powering DivX SearchMASSIVE: Microsoft May Acquire Yahoo for $50 Billion
Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. STARTUP DETAILS: Company Name: Swarrm 20-word Description: Swarrm is a social news site that gives users content from around the Web based upon their interests. CEO’s Pitch: Swarrm is based on the idea that rather than sifting through thousands of stories submitted by strangers to find something you like, Swarrm users could have news presented to them aesthetically and efficiently as it’s published based upon interest. What Pandora did for music discovery, we hope Swarrm will do for news and blog content. Swarrm has several pieces of intelligence running behind the scenes. The system looks at things like user preference and behavior in addition to interaction with friends and ascertains what a particular user may like to see. Swarrm also extracts stories from several thousand sources and serves them up based upon keywords of interest designated by the user. The same methodology works inversely to diminish content frequency if it seems there is no interest. Other features include the ability to see all current content from a specific site rather than cherry picked stories. Users can submit articles to 3rd party sites including Digg, Reddit, Newsvine. Features like auto-tagging, micro-blogging and more, create a unique experience news junkies are sure to like. Mashable’s Take: How many of you read multiple blogs on a given day? How do you choose which ones to read? A bunch of services have set out to answer this question, and have created products that address the recommendation system a number of different ways, from personalized feed readers to curated memes to group interaction with a given set of search results. Swarrm, currently in private beta, is the latest to take on this particular feat in a way that may not be the most useful right away, but has caught enough of my attention to point out its system. What Swarrm does is ask you your news topic preferences and presents an activity feed of sorts with news items listed according to their time stamp and date. You can see where items come from based on the icons that appear for each, along with the article’s title (meaning there is no summary paragraph or two-sentence snippets, Google-news style). From there, you can choose to view the whole article, share the item with your Swarrm friends, submit it to a flurry of other social and bookmarking networks, or save it to your Swarrm account. The sharing option obviously presents itself as an internal “trusted” recommendation system allowing for direct suggestions amongst users. What’s missing, however, is an ongoing direct feedback system in Swarrm for indicating what type of content you’d rather not see. This limits the amount of true filtering and recommending Swarrm can offer its end users. What I find interesting about Swarrm is its news delivery format, which looks a lot like a FriendFeed activity stream. (To that end, it wouldn’t hurt Swarrm to offer an RSS export capability for its recommendations and search results.) So while on one hand Swarrm appears to be very similar to services like FriendFeed, there is the ever-growing problem of content overload coming from activity feeds like FriendFeed that don’t readily offer the most practical filtering and recommendations. Whether this is re-hashing of content in a filtered way or a useful tactic for finding good content will depend on Swarrm’s execution. Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials
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