As I've mentioned, I've seen a lot of Web 2.0 companies in recent weeks and most of them have ranged between promising and impressive. Among my favorites is the Personal Bee.
During my interview with Personal Bee, CEO Ted Shelton and founder Nicholas Chim, Shelton told me the “Bee” was selected as an allusion to masthead names used in colonial American journalism. Bee was the name of one of the first Colonial newspapers. Shelton told me that it was used to depict the sense of a busy hive's social community, making it an ideal retro name for the Web 2.0 era personal newspaper that let’s you aggregate news to your personal tastes and share it with anyone or no one as you may choose.
(I'm a J-School grad and I recall early colonial newspaper names that, along with "Bee" included "Wasp," "Hornet," and "Spy." As I was taught, these names were not communal at all. They implied what the publishers planned to do to these with opposing views. It is no matter. Bee is a great name for what they have done with this valuable, next generation way to aggregate your RSS-fed news.)
In fact, I liked just about everything I heard and have seen about Personal Bee. It lets me find information the way I want to. It lets me decide what's important to me and of even greater value--it let's me decide who.
Let me give you my three favorite reasons to like Personal Bee:
• I choose who’s important. I can calibrate Personal Bee to let me choose what RSS feeds are important to me on any particular topic. This means you have introduced the topic of personal relevance as opposed to numerical relevance such as is used by TechMemeorandum or Technorati. As the editor or as they call it “beekeeper,” I can select and I can determine who influences me the most. I can decide if Searls is more or less influential to me than Scoble and I can do it by topic. To me this is huge. I may trust you as a source for restaurants, and hate you as a recommender for movies. I can make changes on who influences me dynamically. I have always been concerned with the concept that high rankings equally authority. Sometimes, bloggers with tiny readerships influence me more than bloggers of A-List status. When Izzy Stone had a weekly newsletter with 2000 readers, he influenced me more than did the NY Times. Personal Bee gives me something here that I have not previously been able to get.
• Time relevance. Personal Bee places a three-day time frame around an event. That is sort of the maximum attention window for events in the blogosphere, Shelton told me. This is when the first movers are posting source opinions and facts. After that, the discussion that continues is often just a response or reiteration of what was said during that three-day span. I had never thought about this, but in fact, I have noticed that when a topic breaks, I find it becomes reiterative after a few days.• Phrase Clouds replace Tag Clouds. I spend a fair amount of time trying to explain blogging strategy and mechanics to people who know almost nothing about the subject. It may shock blogosphere denizens, but tagging is confusing—even intimidating. Tag Clouds are baffling. , Personal Bee does not use tag clouds, but has replaced them with Phrase Clouds These are automatically generated and the user doesn’t need to do anything. This seems to me a wiser, simpler approach which will prove easier to more and more people who are less and less tech sophisticated.
Like so many great technology projects, Personal Bee did not start with a committee hovering around a conference room in search of a window of opportunity—even though it started and has been incubating in the Sand Hill Road offices of Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV). Instead, it started with a frustrated technologist. Nick Chim was engineer in residence and while most of the population may not yet understand the incredible efficiencies of RSS feeds over website searches,Nick was at the point where surfing his personal feeds was too cumbersome. He tinkered around to figure out a better way to aggregate and manage news feeds. He got it going to the point whee he thought it was cool enough to share with a friend, Ted Shelton was the entrepreneur in residence next door. Shelton thought, with refinement, there may be a business opportunity and thus came the birth of the Bee.
Personal Bee went into public beta a few days ago. You can see some interesting applications of it in the—now public—private beta users including Om Malik and Geoff Moore. Tools to create your own vertical application are available in a few weeks.
Your Bee can be private, limited to a group, or public. You can create a personal or workgroup newsletter pretty easily. You can add your own comments to your workgroup Bee, which I think is a very useful touch.
I advise you to give it a try. I also want to admit it was pretty difficult writing this entire post without once making a pun about "buzz."
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