Last week Facebook made history. After collecting data about its users for years, Facebook turned to designer Nicholas Felton who decided it was time to take that data to the next level and visualize it — and the Timeline was born. But what about what’s going on with the rest of the world, and not just my friends… why doesn’t Facebook have timelines for that? What was once a simple exercise of scanning one or two newspapers a day for interesting headlines and articles has escalated into repetitive scans throughout the day of multiple online news sources (Facebook feed, tweets, RSS feeds, online newspapers and blogs). And in many cases, different sources merely repeat the same story over and over again, making the apparent abundance of options misleading. So while more choice is often better, here it is simply overloading us.

Is this just curation in an infographic world, renamed Timelines?

Parts of it certainly seem to appear similar to what we’ve seen before. One significant component is a continuous scroll called “the stream” that’s an alternative to Facebook’s news feed — a hub of personalized content. It has a companion called “Sparks,” related to one’s specified interests. Together they are designed to be a primary attention-suck of Google users. Google hopes that eventually people will gravitate to the stream in the same way that members...

Our plan is to develop new projects and work on solving big problems aligned along a simple mission statement: The Obvious Corporation develops systems that help people work together to improve the world. This is a dream come true!

It's a good gig if you can get it ...

The U.S. government's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace addresses key issues around identity, privacy and security. Implementation, however, will require significant effort and innovation from the private sector.

This is such a large and complex issue, that when you think about it .. It's the one thing we cannot afford to screw up.

Hirsch jokes that in 10 years, we may very well look back and laugh that we ever had to type something into Google to find what we were looking for. “Smarter” and “more useful” are two terms he uses to describe how the targeted curation will affect your web experience.

What this effectively does is finally dissolve the artifically imposed borders between "white hat" and "black hat" SEO again. Rather than solely exploiting the quirks and weak spots of automated ranking algorithms, this approach will produce web sites that even highly qualified human search engine editors won't find fault with.

I get so conflicted by these types of articles. I am intrigued by how intelligent & sophisticated the thought process is, and then I think about the pollution of the greatest tool ever invented. Imagine what it would be like if we worked towards making things better for everyone as a whole.