Evri Blog

Today is a big day for us. We’re pushing our beta into production and asking people to sign-up and try us out. We have a BHAG: to help users make sense of the web’s content by realizing the vision of the web as a place to browse based on the things that interest them. By doing this, we think we can improve the user experience of experiencing content on the web, and help content sites create higher levels of user engagement. You can take a look at the video of my demo at the D: AllThings Digital conference last month to see the user experience in action.

We have all read and heard a lot about social graphs over the last couple of years and know how compelling, and useful, they can be. Evri is building a data graph of the web, using our technology to understand the People, Places and Things in the web content we read every day-and the actions that connect them to each other. We use this natural language-derived grammatical data to make a unique and compelling (well, we think so) user experience. And, even with great semantically-aware data, it’s all about the UI. Evri is building a “data graph” that shows interesting and useful connections to explore about things in the outside world-things that aren’t part of your social graph.

For example, did you know that George Carlin and Jamie Oliver were connected by only four degrees of separation? Or, that you can easily browse a list of everyone that’s “supporting” or “rejecting” Barack Obama and John McCain? Our profile pages allow you to browse content about your interests in a new way-by the types of things they are connected to and the relationships between them. We show a cool graphical representation of the “data graph” of the object in question (here, one of our favorite musicians), and way to browse content by Verbs and Objects (what is Bon Iver “releasing?”) Also, we show other content, including video from the web.

Our home page is just for fun, and captures the Zeitgeist based on the web content we’ve read, and Evri user activity. The Rising and Falling lists show who or what’s getting hot, or cooling off.

One of our goals is to help content sites solve the “related content problem” and the Evri content widget is our first example of this. We know, and extract, the most important things in any article and create a new user experience based on the content you are already reading. No doing multiple follow-up searches to find contextually related content, just read the article and browse our widget for highly relevant content.

This is just the beginning for us, and we already have plans for many new products and improvements. As the White Stripes say: “When you’re in your little room and you’re working on something good / but if it is really good / You’re gonna need a bigger room.” We think we are working on something good, and would love you to help us get to our bigger room. You can do that by signing up for our beta preview, and giving us lots of feedback-good or bad, we need it all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Evri. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.