Menori

It’s an old idea. Microsoft introduced Active Desktop when IE4 came out and it was a very limited implementation. But as the web has moved on and syndication services such as RSS has taken off, email notifications have evolved and other alerts have become prevalent it’s become and increasingly complex world to work in.

The are a spread of offerings in this space that offer an ‘Attention Engine’ - getting targetted, filtered and useful content to people form applications - and Netjax and Touchstone are two exciting ones.

See the trackback to a ZDNet article here that I commented on.

Touchstone is particularly interersting as it’s the first thing I thought about when I first saw Konfabulator and the widgets for Mac OSX. My thinking in this area stems mainly from the business world rather than as a home user and having been involved in development in the past (mainly in user requirements gathering) everyone wants their users attention. The battle for space on the corporate intranet homepage was massive, alerts were sent in a variety of formats, information was presented at an inappropriate time or using a daft method. All the best to CHRi5 in his quest to produce a gadget for Vista that offers genuine value. No doubt the big boys (SAP, Microsoft, Oracle) etc. will start to pursue this ‘Attention Engine’ market in their corporate ERP and CRM products.

What is more exciting is finding out how people ‘use’ this information. Because if this technology can be used to help measure what information sources people use then the attraction is all the greater. It’s how Google build it’s business model and is still an enormous void for most businesses.