Jaanix: a cool new microblogging tool

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I've been playing with software from a new startup called Jaanix that Jonathan Christensen showed me.   It's a social tagging, microblogging and rating system, something like a hybrid between Digg or de.licio.us.  The big difference is that Jaanix learns what you find interesting and over time surfaces more interesting stuff for you to read.   So, for example, it observes what you post and finds more like it based on the content and tags.  It also lets you rate other posts using Jaa to say you like it, or Nix to say you don't.  As you rate posts that you read, it also takes that information into account.

You can share what you're posting with others as well, since each user gets a custom jaanix page.  My postings are at http://asaunders.jaanix.com/, or if you prefer you can read them from an RSS feed. You can also see what the community as a whole things is interesting by visiting the all page.  And, if you would like to tweak filter manually, Jaanix can show you a list of tags that you find of interest, and then allow you to modify their importance using the clever slider widget shown on the right.

Months ago I abandoned the use of an ordinary RSS reader and became a heavy user of illumio. Illumio sifts through RSS feeds and finds the good stuff.  Like Jaanix, illumio observes my behaviour, and then uses that behaviour to predict which content will interest me.   It's the only way to keep up on the hundreds of feeds I read in a day. 

illumio, unfortunately, suffers from a flaw – that being that it's a desktop application only.  The combination of Jaanix and illumio – a hosted service that found relevant material in RSS feeds – would be brilliant.   For now, I'll use both; illumio to sort feeds, and Jaanix to repost and comment on interesting articles. 

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.