ThinkUp App, the open source web application born from the non-profit Expert Labs that lets you capture, store and analyze your activity across various social networking sites, has rebooted as a commercial entity.
ThinkUp the company will be headed up by Lifehacker founding editor Gina Trapani and famed early blogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash, who have been working together on Expert Labs since 2009. Expert Labs, meanwhile, will be shutting down, according to blog posts by Trapani and Dash.
To help fund its early operations, ThinkUp is seeking to secure some $1 million in a grant through the Knight Foundation's News Challenge (ThinkUp estimates it will need a total of $2.4 million in outside funding.) And this is where it gets really cool: According to its application there, ThinkUp aims to utilize the content it collects on existing corporate social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare to essentially subvert the closed ecosystem they've come to embody — "using those connections to enable the creation of a new decentralized network behind the scenes." In effect, ThinkUp wants to use the weight of the existing social web against it — a Judo move to ultimately make the Internet a more open place.
So why is ThinkUp going to the journalism-focused Knight Foundation for help with this? Because it also plans to build a sexy, newsy website to convince people that decentralized social networking matters. From ThinkUp's Knight application:
"We will draw people in through a compelling media site that encourages participation via our decentralized platform. We have unique experience in creating some of the most important tools and most influential sites on the social web. And we're using that experience to build a decentralized, peer-to-peer network that powers a great media property with broad appeal — imagine if Digg or Reddit were open, decentralized and powered by a network instead of votes."
It all sounds very ambitious, but also very worthwhile. Open web advocates believe that decentralization is essential for maintaining the competition and diversity necessary to keep technology moving forward. But as more and more people spend the majority of time interacting with the Internet through a handful of websites controlled by increasingly powerful companies, in many ways we're farther away from an open web now than ever before. ThinkUp wants to shake up this status quo. Dash explained ThinkUp's mission in his blog post thusly:
"…What ThinkUp represents is a lot of important concepts: Owning your actions and words on the web. Encouraging more positive and fruitful conversations on social networks. Gaining insights into ourselves and our friends based on what we say and share. And the possibility of discovering important information or different perspectives if we can return the web back to its natural state of not being beholden to any one company or proprietary network."
ThinkUp acknowledges that it is not the first to try to make the open social web a reality, and that Diaspora and Singly's Locker Project have similar aims. But ThinkUp's Knight application says these projects have limited traction because they "focus on the tech first rather than a compelling user experience." ThinkUp, on the other hand, is building a super slick app from the start. It also is apparently looking to work alongside the Facebooks and Googles of the world, not totally against them — and to me, that is what could ultimately make ThinkUp a winner.
To be sure, ThinkUp has a long road ahead of it, as it is facing off against some of the most powerful forces on the web today. It's great to see big names such as Trapani and Dash committing to such an endeavor, and it will certainly be interesting to watch ThinkUp's evolution in the weeks and months ahead.
Photo of Gina Trapani courtesy of Flickr user ginatrapani; photo of Anil Dash via dashes.com.
Gina Trapani is a technology blogger, podcaster, book author, and programmer based in San Diego, California by way of Brooklyn, New York. The founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a daily weblog on software and personal productivity, Gina authored a book based on the web site which is in its second edition: Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better (Wiley, March 2008). Currently Gina is a weekly columnist at Harvard Business Online and co-hosts the This Week in...
Anil Dash began Dashes.com in 1999 as one of the earliest blogs on the Internet. Dash is the founding Director of Expert Labs, an independent non-profit which invents new web technologies to help policy makers in the White House and the Federal Government use social networks to tap into the expertise of the public. Dash is also the first partner in Activate, the new strategy consulting firm that advises companies at the intersection of media, entertainment and technology. He...
ThinkUp is a self-hosted web-based application that archives your tweets, friends, and followers and uses them to give you some interesting data about the people you follow and those who follow you. The service was developed by Gina Trapani, and as of September 2010 operates in beta mode. ThinkUp is an open source project licensed under the GNU GPL.
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