Engagd among the top 5 apps in Australia

Ross Dawson has published a list of the top 60 web apps in Australia in the BRW this week. At number 5, our very own Engagd.com - the engine that powers Attention Profiling for the web at large as well as Particls version 2.

This is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the development team. A huge thanks to Ashley Angell, Paul Jones and Jon Cianciullo who have been working tirelessly to manage, build and polish the Engagd platform.

Particls itself came in at 21. That will change of course once we launch the new version!

Thanks to Ross for his hard work compiling the list and including us.

Ashley went to Sydney to demo Engagd at the celebration party. By all accounts it was a big success. Somehow he made a developer platform interesting for a non-technical audience. Good work my friend!

Ma.gnolia rolls out APML support

Ma.gnolia, the web's favorite pure social bookmarking site has launched their APML support today.

They have used Engagd as their APML provider. Engagd made it possible for Ma.gnolia to integrate APML support with a couple of simple API calls. The rest of the text analytics and APML generation is done by our servers.

This is a great day for the cause of DataPortability and the growing ecosystem of tools that respect user rights by allowing us all to export useful attention data from various silos. They join Cluztr, Newsgator and others who have already announced or integrated APML support.

It was a pleasure working with Larry and Todd the Ma.gnolia founders, and I'd also like to thank Chris Messina (fellow DataPortability workgroup member) for the introduction!

For those unfamiliar with APML, here is a blurb from the official APML site.

"APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests. "

You can learn more about their implementation on their blog.

Newsgator and Bloglines support APML

We are very happy to announce the following new developments for APML.

NewsGator Announcement
NewsGator has just announced on their developer blogs that NewsGator Technologies Inc to support APML across its product range starting with FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and NewsGator Inbox

Further, The APML Workgroup is announcing:

• With NewsGator Technologies APML implementation, they now join:
  
  
  • Cluztr.com (Clickstream Sharing),
  
  
  • Dandelife.com (The Social Biography Network) and
  
  
  • Particls.com (Attention Management Engine)
    

  These are three companies that already support APML using Engagd.com APIs.
  Engagd.com makes APML implementation quick and easy using a simple API— great for mash-ups all the way through to large-scale apps.

• There has been a new APML.org site launched - It's designed to make APML a little easier to understand.
  


• There is now a new APML public discussion group for the community.
  


• There have been a number of new additions to the APML Workgroup:


• NewsGator (family of cross-platform and mobile feed aggregators)


• Bloglines (web-based and mobile feed aggregator)


• Me.dium (social browsing)


• Ma.gnolia (social Bookmarking)


• Talis (semantic platform)


• Peepel (multi-window AJAX environment and office suite)
  

This follows previous successes of the APML Workgroup such as:

• Existing members of the Workgroup, including those from Faraday Media, Citizen Agency, Digg, Dow Jones and Compete.
  
  
• Bloglines (Owned by Ask.com/IAC) has previously announced that they are investigating APML support in their product.
  
  
• Open-source APML libraries available for all to use on Google Code.
  
  
• Great explanations of APML usage by Marjolein Hoekstra (Basics of Attention Profiling), Ben Metcalfe (Thoughts on Tom Morris on APML) and Elias Bizannes (What is APML and why would you want it). Follow the rest of the APML blog discussion on the CleverClogs Attention Profiling news radar.
  

Thanks and Acknowledgements

As usual, I would like to thank everyone involved in and around the APML Workgroup.

Particular thanks to the latest round of announcements must go to Chris Pirillo, Ben Metcalfe, Elias Bizannes, Daniela Barbosa, Ross Dawson and Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Also my personal thanks must go to Marjolein Hoekstra who has been instrumental in pushing things forward.

Coverage

• Read/Write web have picked up the story
• Read the NewsGator/FeedDemon announcement on Nick Bradbury's blog
• IMified have announced support for APML in their FeedCrier product
• Cluztr is providing an APML TagCloud widget
• Daniela Barbosa from Dow Jones has written a great post about APML in the Enterprise
• Ross Dawson writes about the value of a standards based Attention world

Google reader set to abuse more of your Attention Data

Cross Post from the Engagd Blog:


The recent leak of Google's plans for its Google Reader product are interesting. Particularly the following point:

Very soon, Google Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.

Every day, more and more applications - particularly Google Apps - are starting to use and abuse your Attention Data.

This is a growing concern that I have been tracking for some time.

From that previous post:

Are you so willing to give up your rights so easily? You are, in effect, saying that you are happy for Google to absorb all your personal data - your digital identity (incidentally your digital identity is quickly becoming a large proportion of your overall identity) - and you're going to TRUST them to be completely benevolent about it? Forever?

You want no leverage? None? You don't want any accountability? Ownership? Mobility? Economy? Transparency? Because while I love Google as much as the next person - they are not transparent. And they do not respect your Attention rights.

This brings me to my next point. Economy implies that something (property) has value (in this case your Attention Data and Attention Profile). It also implies that you can transfer your property (and its value). You can sell it and leveraged and do all sorts of fancy things. It also requires multiple participants in an ecosystem.

So to dig deeper into Sam's original question "Is Google Building the Attention Economy?" the answer is no.

Google is not building the Attention Economy. They are using their huge surface area to try to grab as much of your Attention Data as possible to target and sell ads on TV, Radio, Web and Print. They are increasingly becoming an 'Attention Aware Advertising Company'.

Another key question now is, if you have an application that displays RSS/ATOM, do you have a Personal Relevancy/Attention Data strategy? If not, your software will quickly become obsolete.

Join the APML workgroup and add Engagd functionality to your feed reader today (as others are) to make sure your feed reading efforts remain relevant (pun intended).