July 19, 2013 at 13:37More than GoogleReader: let's do it together!
We want to inform the Habr expert community about the public phase of the project to create a service that includes, in addition to the capabilities of a dead Google reader, many new features, functions and gingerbread cookies!
And, since we are doing a project for us, our colleagues, ordinary geeks and advanced users, we hope for your comments, criticism, comments, suggestions - everything that will help you get a product that is convenient for us all to use. Do you want with us? Welcome!
Our teams (we can say that we have formed a “consortium” of diverse industrial teams) are the same developers, linguists, designers, marketers, system engineers, sociologists, testers, analysts, just like you. Like everyone else, we always considered ourselves very experienced and knowledgeable, we wanted a high salary and interesting projects. Each of us worked in different companies, in different cities, and we all engaged in different and quite ordinary tasks (“puddle, I solder, I fix the primus!” (C)).
Six months or a year ago, in search of a “different life”, each with its own paths, we came to a new project and, even a little unexpectedly for ourselves, began to “light up”: to do what we could not even imagine. Because no one could imagine, except for “stupid customers and clever partners,” who only did what they asked themselves completely unsolvable tasks: “Can you predict who will win the election?”, “Can you make an automatic key? And in Spanish? ”,“ Can you make the “Obama Button” ?, “Can you outline the fire zone with tweets?”, Etc. interesting nonsense.
Along the way, we, as always, learned our own rake, invented bicycles, and, inexplicably, achieved interesting results, expanded, invited new specialists from unknown industries, developed in breadth from a sedentary lifestyle - the usual life of an ordinary team solving unusual problems. We came up with beautiful words for our activities: “Operational Sociology” (the term was voiced by one of our most sensible clients and has been actively used since), OBD & A (Online Big Data & Analytics), “real-time monitoring of social media”, and we designed beautiful words in projects. Some public projects are already described in our blog .
And then, as always happens in life, the point P has come (or X, or G - for an amateur):
1. Our Platform and Intelligent Analytical Systems began to live a stable life, having stopped waking up with SMSs and voice robots due to night failures. We are bored.
2. We ourselves began to use our decisions in off-office life: to read only the necessary news, watch TV programs with evaluative opinions of the audience (the French call it “social television”), show off to friends predicting the results of the World Cup in football, and not go to stupid films, but only good ones, to help parents and children choose the right vacation spots and much more.
3. Google said it was closing GoogleReader. And we used GoogleReader on smartphones and tablets.
We do not consider ourselves competent in the development of mobile solutions and were sure that several teams “in Russia and nearby” would surely want to close the vacant niche after the GR was closed and would develop a “Russian-language GR”. And we even tried to inform these teams of our readiness to help with information and technological support, since by spring we had already reached good flow rates and a convincing amount of the collected message base, and realized that creating and maintaining the Platform was a costly affair, requiring a number of non-standard solutions tasks, and few in Russia can afford such a pleasure.
Either we searched poorly, or the GR niche seemed uninteresting, as a result, we did not find anyone in a couple of months. And again they made a decision: we are expanding the Platform, we are looking for right and fast partners with experience in mobile solutions, and we are developing a product with three main functional blocks:
1. Reader of content streams (RSS, site pages, forum posts).
2. Filtering of prefabricated thematic tapes (for example, all messages from social media about the Olympics in Sochi).
3. Watching the receipt of new materials in the accounts of different social networks: your own, as well as accounts of friends, interesting personalities, companies, groups, with the ability to post replies.
NB! What do we mean by social media: public messages and comments on social networks, twitter, blog posts, forums, materials of online media and thematic sites, review services, etc.
A few weeks of active correspondence with a dozen companies developing mobile solutions from different regions of ex-USSR, discussing non-standard approaches to joint development and tight deadlines, discussing options for public actions, and finally, “He said,“ Let's go! ”
So in a hurry, that it’s not enough time spent on inventing a product name. The current working name of the product is (personal) Media Center - or simply MC, perhaps someone reading the post will be able to come up with a prettier name - welcome! We will issue a valuable cash prize for the decision. :)
Since the Media Center is intended for a wide audience, we initially decided that it was necessary to involve as many experienced, smart and sensible people as possible, with diverse experience in development and knowledge, as well as those with personal experience using GoogleReader, Yandex.News , GoogleNews, HotSuite, Feedly, News360, FlipBoard and many other good and useful programs. We hope that in the framework of the discussion, criticism, and proposing “Wishlist for my beloved” a set of only the necessary functionality and a comfortable user interface that is convenient for us (the people) will be formed.
Therefore, we decided to open a corporate blog on Habré, where we will post all materials on the functional design of the product, user interfaces, graphical solutions, etc. - for control by the public, since then the public will use (we work for this) this product.
In the meantime, there will be a “creative discussion”, in the meantime, we will buy equipment in new racks, expand the Platform API, connect new information sources and re-categorize old ones, increase the speed, accuracy and completeness of linguistic modules, train auto-classification systems, and deploy new heuristics to identify spam bots in social media, we introduce technologies for detecting fuzzy duplicates, increase the percentage of geolocation and much more.
If someone is interested in discussing this kind of tasks in our blog or in a personal conversation, we will be happy to talk with teams, experts and experts in the field of HighLoad systems, linguistics, sociology, Big Data analytics, distributed computing systems, MapReduce, SMA (social media analytics), full-text search, product marketing, mobile solutions, integration solutions, application development for social networks.
According to our very concise plans, the first version of the Media Center should be available to the general public already in September, if there are people who want to try to play with it at the testing stage - again welcome!
There will be versions for iPad / iPhone / Android / Web, the main functionality is free, some advanced features such as real time and a large number of thematic tapes are planned that will seriously load the infrastructure and which will be taken out in a separate subsystem.
We are well aware that in ten paragraphs it is impossible to tell in detail about everything. In the coming days, we will post here design options (our partners prepared 4 primary options) and the user interface, and now we would like to get some more of your valuable time on the stories about your experience in using applications for working with information streams and social networks . Your real experience will help us to take into account previously unnoticed nuances, problems and solutions in the process of finalizing the functional design that is ending these days. And in retaliation, we are of course ready to answer your questions (with the exception of “Do we need it?” Because “we need it”).
We all have phones, smartphones, tablets. On gadgets:
- What "readers" (RSS) did you use, which one do you use now?
- We have not met a single person who used GoogleNews to work with thematic news, several dozen Yandex users. News, hundreds of GoogleAlerts users. And in what ways do you get thematic information (for example, on your professional activities)?
- How do you “live” in social networks: do you use 2-3-N applications, separately for each social network? Or are you using social aggregators like HutSuite?
- If you are a user of at least one of the above, what would you like to add to this, or, on the contrary, interferes with your work?
We would also like to thank all voluntary or involuntary (co) participants in the MC project in advance, and in the future, to thank. It remains to be thought out which option of gratitude is the best. Do you have any suggestions? - Welcome! ;)
And, since we are doing a project for us, our colleagues, ordinary geeks and advanced users, we hope for your comments, criticism, comments, suggestions - everything that will help you get a product that is convenient for us all to use. Do you want with us? Welcome!
Who is Mr. P ... PalitrumLab?
Our teams (we can say that we have formed a “consortium” of diverse industrial teams) are the same developers, linguists, designers, marketers, system engineers, sociologists, testers, analysts, just like you. Like everyone else, we always considered ourselves very experienced and knowledgeable, we wanted a high salary and interesting projects. Each of us worked in different companies, in different cities, and we all engaged in different and quite ordinary tasks (“puddle, I solder, I fix the primus!” (C)).
Once upon a time ...
Six months or a year ago, in search of a “different life”, each with its own paths, we came to a new project and, even a little unexpectedly for ourselves, began to “light up”: to do what we could not even imagine. Because no one could imagine, except for “stupid customers and clever partners,” who only did what they asked themselves completely unsolvable tasks: “Can you predict who will win the election?”, “Can you make an automatic key? And in Spanish? ”,“ Can you make the “Obama Button” ?, “Can you outline the fire zone with tweets?”, Etc. interesting nonsense.
Along the way, we, as always, learned our own rake, invented bicycles, and, inexplicably, achieved interesting results, expanded, invited new specialists from unknown industries, developed in breadth from a sedentary lifestyle - the usual life of an ordinary team solving unusual problems. We came up with beautiful words for our activities: “Operational Sociology” (the term was voiced by one of our most sensible clients and has been actively used since), OBD & A (Online Big Data & Analytics), “real-time monitoring of social media”, and we designed beautiful words in projects. Some public projects are already described in our blog .
And then, as always happens in life, the point P has come (or X, or G - for an amateur):
1. Our Platform and Intelligent Analytical Systems began to live a stable life, having stopped waking up with SMSs and voice robots due to night failures. We are bored.
2. We ourselves began to use our decisions in off-office life: to read only the necessary news, watch TV programs with evaluative opinions of the audience (the French call it “social television”), show off to friends predicting the results of the World Cup in football, and not go to stupid films, but only good ones, to help parents and children choose the right vacation spots and much more.
3. Google said it was closing GoogleReader. And we used GoogleReader on smartphones and tablets.
The future is here!
We do not consider ourselves competent in the development of mobile solutions and were sure that several teams “in Russia and nearby” would surely want to close the vacant niche after the GR was closed and would develop a “Russian-language GR”. And we even tried to inform these teams of our readiness to help with information and technological support, since by spring we had already reached good flow rates and a convincing amount of the collected message base, and realized that creating and maintaining the Platform was a costly affair, requiring a number of non-standard solutions tasks, and few in Russia can afford such a pleasure.
Either we searched poorly, or the GR niche seemed uninteresting, as a result, we did not find anyone in a couple of months. And again they made a decision: we are expanding the Platform, we are looking for right and fast partners with experience in mobile solutions, and we are developing a product with three main functional blocks:
1. Reader of content streams (RSS, site pages, forum posts).
2. Filtering of prefabricated thematic tapes (for example, all messages from social media about the Olympics in Sochi).
3. Watching the receipt of new materials in the accounts of different social networks: your own, as well as accounts of friends, interesting personalities, companies, groups, with the ability to post replies.
NB! What do we mean by social media: public messages and comments on social networks, twitter, blog posts, forums, materials of online media and thematic sites, review services, etc.
A few weeks of active correspondence with a dozen companies developing mobile solutions from different regions of ex-USSR, discussing non-standard approaches to joint development and tight deadlines, discussing options for public actions, and finally, “He said,“ Let's go! ”
So in a hurry, that it’s not enough time spent on inventing a product name. The current working name of the product is (personal) Media Center - or simply MC, perhaps someone reading the post will be able to come up with a prettier name - welcome! We will issue a valuable cash prize for the decision. :)
Since the Media Center is intended for a wide audience, we initially decided that it was necessary to involve as many experienced, smart and sensible people as possible, with diverse experience in development and knowledge, as well as those with personal experience using GoogleReader, Yandex.News , GoogleNews, HotSuite, Feedly, News360, FlipBoard and many other good and useful programs. We hope that in the framework of the discussion, criticism, and proposing “Wishlist for my beloved” a set of only the necessary functionality and a comfortable user interface that is convenient for us (the people) will be formed.
Therefore, we decided to open a corporate blog on Habré, where we will post all materials on the functional design of the product, user interfaces, graphical solutions, etc. - for control by the public, since then the public will use (we work for this) this product.
In the meantime, there will be a “creative discussion”, in the meantime, we will buy equipment in new racks, expand the Platform API, connect new information sources and re-categorize old ones, increase the speed, accuracy and completeness of linguistic modules, train auto-classification systems, and deploy new heuristics to identify spam bots in social media, we introduce technologies for detecting fuzzy duplicates, increase the percentage of geolocation and much more.
If someone is interested in discussing this kind of tasks in our blog or in a personal conversation, we will be happy to talk with teams, experts and experts in the field of HighLoad systems, linguistics, sociology, Big Data analytics, distributed computing systems, MapReduce, SMA (social media analytics), full-text search, product marketing, mobile solutions, integration solutions, application development for social networks.
According to our very concise plans, the first version of the Media Center should be available to the general public already in September, if there are people who want to try to play with it at the testing stage - again welcome!
There will be versions for iPad / iPhone / Android / Web, the main functionality is free, some advanced features such as real time and a large number of thematic tapes are planned that will seriously load the infrastructure and which will be taken out in a separate subsystem.
We are well aware that in ten paragraphs it is impossible to tell in detail about everything. In the coming days, we will post here design options (our partners prepared 4 primary options) and the user interface, and now we would like to get some more of your valuable time on the stories about your experience in using applications for working with information streams and social networks . Your real experience will help us to take into account previously unnoticed nuances, problems and solutions in the process of finalizing the functional design that is ending these days. And in retaliation, we are of course ready to answer your questions (with the exception of “Do we need it?” Because “we need it”).
We all have phones, smartphones, tablets. On gadgets:
- What "readers" (RSS) did you use, which one do you use now?
- We have not met a single person who used GoogleNews to work with thematic news, several dozen Yandex users. News, hundreds of GoogleAlerts users. And in what ways do you get thematic information (for example, on your professional activities)?
- How do you “live” in social networks: do you use 2-3-N applications, separately for each social network? Or are you using social aggregators like HutSuite?
- If you are a user of at least one of the above, what would you like to add to this, or, on the contrary, interferes with your work?
We would also like to thank all voluntary or involuntary (co) participants in the MC project in advance, and in the future, to thank. It remains to be thought out which option of gratitude is the best. Do you have any suggestions? - Welcome! ;)
