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?

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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.

Most people want to track their interests without the hassle of deciding which people to follow. Primal Radar can help. It follows your interests and alerts you to new information and updates as soon as they become available.

We’ve added a number of features to Radar to provide a more personalized experience:

• Related interests: After providing a few words to start, Radar will surface topics and content that you can use as a starting point. Clicking on a topic in the navigation bar will narrow the scope of Primal Radar to that specific topic.
• Build an knowledge network: As you explore, new topics will be automatically added to your knowledge network. Primal uses your knowledge network to understand what interests you, providing more personalized results over time.
• Explicit personalization: Review and modify the content of your knowledge network at any time by clicking on “Top Thoughts” or “All Thoughts” in the navigation bar.
• Add and remove topics: You can add new topics to a page by typing them into the navigation bar. You can also delete the ones you no longer want.
• Social sharing: You can share a feed of your interests with others, either via RSS, email, or your favorite social network. 

Primal Radar is free for individuals. Give it a try and let us know what you think. If you need more information, please visit the Primal Radar Learning Center.

We were recently featured in The Waterloo Record for “Planking”. Check out the article today!

It’s Friday afternoon, and your boss asks you to write a report on a relatively obscure topic. Soon after starting you realize there is no way the report will be ready on time. You try some Web searches and are quickly overwhelmed with irrelevant information. What you really need is for the report to meet you halfway.

Primal Pages can help. It summarizes information from the real-time Web and organizes it into a personal website. Pages assembles your website on-the-fly as you explore your interests. You can use it to quickly outline the content you need instead of searching across the Web for it!

We’ve added a number of features to Pages to provide a more personalized experience:

• Create content: Clicking on topics creates content instantly and in an organized format.
• Real-Time Web: Explore topics, related topics and content from the real-time Web that interests you by clicking on terms in the navigation. Clicking on a term will change the content of your Pages and make it increasingly more relevant for you.
• Build a knowledge base: Every time you click on a term, Primal will add it to your knowledge-base of topics. Pages remembers your interests to better anticipate your needs over time.
• Personalize: You can add new Pages by adding in new terms in the navigation menu. Primal Pages lets you “pin” information on your page, delete or add terms, and add your own introductory content.
• Topic Suggestions: Pages will surface suggested topics and relevant content that will enhance your knowledge-base and allow you to deepen your understanding of a topic.
• View original source: Content on your site has the original sources available for you to visit at any point.
• Dynamic links: Highlight new topics within the content and generate links to new Pages.
• Publish: If you like, you can generate a unique URL for your Pages that you can share with others. Visitors to your Pages will see the same selection of topics and whatever content you’ve created or pinned.
• Social: Share your Primal Pages with your social network via Facebook, Twitter, or email

Primal Pages is available free for individuals. Give it a try and let us know what you think. If you need more information, please visit our Learning Center.

InLab Ventures Jenn Karlman interviews Primal’s newest advisor Larry Cornett at DEMO. Larry introduces thought networking and the opportunities for Internet automation to revolutionize the consumer experience.