Hurley's World

So last night while I was killing time on-line before heading out to my 10pm soccer game, I spent some time checking out Pete’s site, where I saw a little update on the progress over at Root.net. Now Root and AttentionTrust are concepts that I have been skeptical and critical of in the past to say the least… however, since visiting Seth and the gang back in January, I have slowly been coming around on this idea, and am now beginning to see a clearer picture evolve as to what larger implications and applications this all might have. Now I am not quite at 100% buy in just yet, but I am at least moving in the direction toward greater understanding and ultimately acceptance. The key for Root and the gang is still to get over the hump and take a concept that is on the fringes of nerd understanding at best, and package/deliver it in a way that the average web user can understand and appreciate. The development and expansion of the Vault interface has been key to my buy in and to maintaining my interest thus far. In the beginning, when the whole process from the user end involved was simply recording my web surfing habits to a non-descript XML file, the excitement factor of the whole thing was similar to that of nail clipping. But as the interface has evolved into a mind-bending graphical representation of just how much crap I spend my time on, it has become far more interesting and intriguing. For now, for me, the Vaults get a strong 9.5 on the “neat-o scale”, but that’s about it. I look forward to seeing some practical, consumer benefiting applications for this data soon. The API is a good start of course, and I have no doubt that Seth and the Attentionphiles in NYC are working every day behind the scenes on making this happen. In the meanwhile, for you casual users, I definitely recommend installing the Firefox extension, sending the data to Root, and checking out the data on your data.