Yesterday, Robert Scoble commented about a web service that “looks at your Twitter and other social networking behavior and tells you stuff about it.”
I was very excited about the idea of an intelligent service that would recommend content tailored to my interests. We are officially entering an era of Newsfeed overdose, and any technology that allows me to filter stuff is a God send.
The service is called Popego, and it promises the user to “Enjoy a more meaningful web”. Unfortunately the service falls short in its promise.
Let me start with the positive things about it.
Signing up is really easy. It automagically discovers a lot of the services you participate in, and then creates something called “My Personal Web”, which analyzes the stuff you’ve participated in, creates a tag cloud of it and then displays it back to the user.
This information is also used to generate my public “Autoblog” (check out my Popego Autoblog) The Autoblog also allows your visitors to filter on the content presented (videos, pictures, posts, etc.)
One thing that I immediately noticed, though, is that the tag cloud somehow doesn’t ring true to me. Now this is a non-scientific assesment of my own, and could be accurate. However, there is no way to tweak the tags.
But even more offputting was the list of items that Popego generated for me. These included “Family reunion football game of the Yennes and Rothenflues at Tanglewood Resort in Texas on Thanksgiving weekend 2007″ from a user called “jyenne”, “Homemade firebreathing Godzilla” by a user “imme5150″ and “50 Hot MySpace Music Layouts” by user “cristi”. How are these items related to me?
I also tried, without any luck, to add a couple of my Twitter friends that have Popego accounts (Christian Van Der Henst is one of them) to be associated with me. I don’t see any way to befriend them, although the service asks me to invite users via email.
I Twitted about these issues, but didn’t see any reply back from the company’s Twitter bot, which in this day and age is imperative to grow a userbase. I also saw some users complaining about it on Twitter.
The video below explains, albeit lightly and with a very robotic female voice, what Popego is about. I’m still trying to find that out.
I feel like this is a very pretty application, with lots of AJAX and icons, but no soul. Do you have any thoughts on Popego? Let me know on the comments.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for bringing popego up! I had created an account in October to check it out, but never went back.
After taking a second glance at it, I can see Popego having some potential… but they’ll have to work towards it. Before changing my settings, the tags were completely wrong. It really wasn’t as intuitive as I’d like it to be, nowhere near it. I don’t see myself using it until they make some major improvements though.
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Thanks a lot for your honest and detailed review. We are working very hard on feeding a nice and shiny soul to Popego right now, and some upcoming features are aiming that way. As we are on Beta, we are constantly trying new ideas and ways to improve our algorithms until we nail it. Dealing with information overdose is not an easy thing.
Posts like yours are very helpful indeed to let us understand what’s working and what needs immediate attention from the team. Some key things are to a) significantly improve the interest profiles (not just use tags, but also categorires) b) use new and more sophisticated criteria for our matching algorithm and c) lower the barrier of entry.
So.. please stay tuned. Improvements will be coming in the next month as we work hard on key aspects. We won’t stop until we give Popego that soul you’re asking for :)
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