The Feed Dashboard
Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital has a great post on the topic of News Feeds and how they are potentially evolving into a “SNMP 2.0″ of sorts. Josh drew some analogies from the world of a NOC (Network Operations Center) where thousands of SNMP traps come into the monitoring systems. The availability of feeds is exploding and bridging all types of online content. We already have information overload issues, so borrowing a few key concepts from the NOCs can help manage all of this.
Josh’s analogy resonated particularly well here at Filtrbox for a few reasons.
- I used to run a NOC for a content distribution network (Volera), and these concepts are quite familiar and in some cases have been woven into the DNA of Filtrbox
- The Filtrbox Dashboard is like the NOC alerting system that constantly processes all inbound alerts and decided which ones need the most attention.
- Filtrbox is ideal for tracking a large volume of information without increasing the workload. Need to monitor another 10 items? You simply create the Filtrs - you don’t have to manually create or hunt down individual source feeds and then process everything in them
- Our interactive Dashboard provides drill-down. 3 clicks or less to get from a high-level activity spike to the source articles behind it.
Part of the discussion in Josh’s post is around feed aggregators like SocialThing! or FriendFeed. These services act as “feed funnels” really - they consolidate updates to your accounts, (and let you post updates centrally as well) and your friends’ accounts on social media services. They address the “too many services, too many updates” part of the problem, but they don’t extract the underlying value in the content or address the broader problem of being able to deal with content coming at you from multiple content domains. If you need to proactively monitor social media feeds, blog posts, and mainstream news for mentions of specific items, you should be able to do this in one place, and with some notation of “tuning”, just like in a NOC where the admins can set the severity level of any given inbound alarm.
Update: While writing this post, I noticed Brad Feld chimed in also with some additional thoughts on the topic.