Like most technically-inspired revolutions in human history, the internet has evolved as a wonderful, chaotic free-for-all of information and community association. Much of the past decade has been spent trying to bring order to this libertine melange – to make the World Wide Web a logical and useful tool for human advancement.
One of the problems with this frenzied digital sprawl has been information overload – or, rather, the scarcity of solutions to help us cope with the dramatically increased volume of information now at our fingertips.
For all our power to both leave and track information online – comments, reviews, orders, competitors, etc. – there have been few ways to co-ordinate and contextualise the bits of information that are relevant to us in all the disparate digital neighbourhoods of cyberspace.
London-based uberVU is bringing order to the chaos with its conversation-tracking aggregation technology. Users enter a url they want uberVU to track (say, your blog url) and uberVU begins tracking everything published at that url (say, blog posts, comments and trackbacks), as well as conversations that kick off or fragment into the parallel universes of other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, etc. These conversation threads are aggregated into the uberVU tracking interface.
uberVU’s philosophy is that what people are saying about you, or about anything online, is as much a part of the picture as what they are referencing. The site tour presents this example:
The conversation around those stories takes place across many services. You might upload a video on YouTube that gets embedded in a blog post. That post gets comments and it gets posted on Twitter, where it also gets some replies. The Twitter post gets to FriendFeed where the conversation continues.
All of this is part of a single conversation, but you can’t see it because it’s trapped inside different services. That’s where uberVU comes in.
Indeed, uberVU has taken the logical next step and introduced a “track with uberVU” web browser bookmarklet. It has also added the ability to reply to comments from all over, right in the uberVU interface (once third-party permission is granted).
The result is a great snapshot of all the chatter relating to specific content online. It enables super-efficient ego surfing (monitoring online chatter about you) as well as building a useful repository of other information you’re interested in.
uberVU recently collaborated with innovative blog comment service Disqus to apply the comment aggregation to posts on popular social media blog, Mashable.
