A growing list of companies are making “interests” the focus of their value proposition: Twitter allows you to “follow your interests”; Gravity “unlocks the interest graph”; Pinterest “organize(s) and share(s) the things you love”; Quora “connects you to everything you want to know about”; Chime.in “connect(s) around your interests” — just to name a few.

Many believe the company that dominates interest networking will be The Next Big Thing (1) (2) (3).

But interest networking remains a bit of a mystery. What is it?

Interest networking is not social networking

Interest networking is often seen as an extension of social networking. Rene Reinsberg (MIT) describes the Interest Graph as “an online representation of individuals’ interests, with people and interests being the nodes of the graph.”

Part of the confusion here is that social networks are often leveraged to construct interest networks, but the end shouldn’t be confused with the means. By definition, a social network organizes information about people and their activities. An interest network organizes information around a set of interests, which may be yours and yours alone. Interest networks do not need social networking.

Collective vs. individual interests

Virtually all interest networking products and services are focused on collective interests, shared across groups of people. For example, Quora takes a collective approach, as does Chime.in, which lets users “build communities around topics.”

But the collective approach fails to recognize that interests are highly individual. It’s frustrating to have an interest in, say, classical guitar duet sheet music, only to be told, “Sorry, we don’t know anything about that. Did you mean Learn Guitar?”

Interest networking services need to manage the individual, unbounded nature of interests.

Transparent vs. opaque interest networks

Social networks don’t leave you with any doubt about who your friends are. Similarly, interest networks should make it transparent which interests they connect on your behalf.

Many companies are building black-box, opaque interest networks. When these services provide recommendations, they frequently have an almost-creepy feeling to them: We’ve recommended this article to you based on a statistical analysis of your usage. It makes the user wonder what the service knows about them.

Interest networking services should be absolutely transparent, enabling more human-like recommendations: Because you like the history and culture of Egypt, we thought you would find this article about Cleopatra interesting.

The Core Features of Interest Networking

In summary, interest networks should:

• organize around interests, for people, not about people;
• support very specific and individual interests, not just broad topics or categories;
• be transparent in their operation.

In 2012, Primal will begin rolling out our interest networking API with these core capabilities in mind. We invite you to join us in building interest networking services and applications, powered by Primal.

For more information, please read:

• http://about.primal.com/solutions/
• http://about.primal.com/developer/

At Primal, we believe software agents have a big role to play in the Web’s evolution. More like virtual assistants than applications, software agents work continuously on your behalf, delivering value even while you’re away from your computer or smartphone.

But a virtual assistant is only as smart as its data. Imagine you commissioned an assignment like, “keep an eye on the latest news, and email me when you find a story I will like.” How could you communicate your specific interests to your virtual assistant?

You might provide it with a phrase, say, “non-invasive cancer treatment strategies under development.” But without understanding the meaning of that interest, the assistant could only send you articles containing those exact words.

Primal is building a virtual assistant we call the Research Assistant that addresses these issues using our computational engine and semantic synthesis technology.

Here’s how it will work:

• You email the Research Assistant with a few words to describe a new assignment.
• The Assistant uses Primal’s computational engine to generate a rich interest network. In our example, it would include hundreds of topics closely related to your assignment, like “research”, “chemotherapy”, “leukemia”, “robotics”, “pharmaceuticals”, and so on.
• This new information greatly expands the amount of data available to the Assistant, giving it the ability to truly understand your assignment.
• The Assistant operates autonomously, analyzing everything from documents, news articles, and blog posts, to tweets and social media, looking for content that matches your interests.
• Whenever the Assistant discovers content it thinks you will like, it delivers it to your favorite RSS reader.
• The Assistant also pays attention to which articles you read and which ones you ignore, and uses that information to improve your interest network over time.

If you’re as excited about the Research Assistant as we are, then you will be happy to learn that we need alpha testers to help us build it. To participate, please visit research.primal.com.

Primal’s Mo Bros for 2011.

During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces around the world. With their “Mo’s”, these men raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer.

If you’d like to help out, please donate.

Excerpt from The Waterloo Region Record, Technology Spotlight 2011

By Chuck Howitt, The Record

Two years ago Tony Sarris was living the American dream. He was an engineering director for Unisys, a large U.S. information technology company with 37,000 employees worldwide. He lived in the west coast paradise of Laguna Beach, California. He made a comfortable salary.

Today, he works for a small Waterloo internet search company with 35 employees that few people have heard of. Goodbye surf, sand and sun. Hello grey skies, snow and cold winters. Has he lost his mind?

Sarris admits that at first he was hugely skeptical about moving to this area to work for Primal, which specializes in semantic technology to make web searching more personal. Now he has no doubt it was the right decision. “For the opportunity to work for this company, I would go to the Arctic, I think. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that,” he says with a laugh.

For years, educators and leaders in Waterloo Region’s tech community have worried about a brain drain to the U.S. — losing the best and brightest to the lure of Silicon Valley or other tech clusters like those in Seattle and Boston. To be sure, that kind of exodus is still going on. Grads and co-op students are realizing the Canadian dream by moving to San Jose to work for technology companies. But a brain gain in reverse is also starting to awaken.

Companies in Waterloo Region are developing their own game-changing technology, and big league talent from south of the border is moving north to catch the wave. “A-players want to be challenged,” says Yvan Couture, chief executive officer and co-president of Primal. “We have an office full of top notch people who could work anywhere. They could make more money somewhere else. They work here because the project is hard and that’s fun.”

Sarris’s odyssey to Canada began two years ago when he was asked to be a guest speaker at a conference on semantic technology in San Francisco. Sharing the bill with him was Peter Sweeney, founder and co-president of Primal. Sarris had submitted an abstract on where semantic technology was going and what was needed to make it happen. He considered himself an expert in the field and had studied it since the concept first surfaced about 20 years ago. When he took a look at Sweeney’s abstract, his jaw nearly dropped to the floor. The little Canadian company was already working on much of what he was suggesting. “I was just amazed that some company was out there doing a lot of the most challenging pieces,” he says. “There were people working on the edge pieces, starting to nibble at it, but very few were working on the core of the next generation of semantic technology.”

The pair started communicating back and forth. One day Sweeney asked Sarris if he would consider working for Primal. “I said, ‘Canada? You want me to move from Southern California to Canada? It’s a beautiful place to visit, but I’m not living there’.” Nonetheless, Sarris came up for an interview and started looking around. He had heard of the University of Waterloo, but knew nothing about the community itself. He was surprised at how similar it was to some of the tech pockets in the U.S.

At the same time, he was bored at Unisys. He says that like a lot of large corporations, it was focusing on advancing the current state of the art, not breaking new ground. He missed the excitement of working for a small, innovative company. In June 2010, he moved north and hasn’t looked back since.

Sarris isn’t the only American with impressive credentials working at Primal. Nikhil Sriraman was employed as a patent attorney at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Washington, DC, when a friend decided to leave the patent office to do some work for Primal in Washington. Sriraman was curious. What was it about this small Canadian company that would lure his colleague away from the patent office? He went to Primal’s website and started doing some research.

At the same time, he looked at its patent applications. “I thought, this is some really, really good stuff,” says Sriraman, who specialized in patents in robotics and artificial intelligence, an element of semantic technology.

He was so impressed that he offered to work for Primal for free in his spare time. He also came for a few visits. “The more and more I got exposed to the culture and people and technology, the more and more I kind of got drawn in,” says Sriraman. He moved to Waterloo last November to work as Primal’s full-time U.S. patent attorney.

In both cases, Couture says Primal set out to find the best people it could get, regardless of where they lived. “Tony probably has more depth in semantic technology than anyone in this company. On the patent side, the core patent market-place is in the U.S. so having a patent attorney from the U.S. made a lot of sense to us.”

Read full article…

Have you ever pondered how semantic engines, vertical search, and interest networking relate to enterprise mobility? In this podcast, Kevin Benedict interviews Primal’s founder and co-president Peter Sweeney on these subjects.