On Monday Adam and I released PalRelay.  It is a solution to finding information without having to navigate the rats nest of irrelevant information often found in search results.

It is not a replacement for searching, its an enhancement that will reduce the number of irrelevant pages found by with the leverage of opinion from friends and colleagues.

It also solves issues that have been headlining recently.  Taking control of your privacy and retaining ownership of your social graph.  PalRelay allows you to decide who gets to know you and how they use that data.  It allows you to remain completely anonymous yet should a website request personalization privileges you can choose whether to allow it or not.

The impression that personalization is universally a bad thing is a decision each individual has to decide.  I like the idea that Amazon tailors its website to my likes and dislikes.

PalRelay acts as a gatekeeper to your personal information and can be used to stop commercial organisations from surreptitiously recording personal information.  Equally it solves the privacy issue by allowing you, the owner of the private data to decide who gets to see it and use it.

PalRelay goes everywhere with me except secure pages (SSL addresses beginning with https such as online banking pages).  Its useful while blogging too, see the following short video for an example:

 

mypph 300x228 Using twitter as an alerting platformI received an email from Clickatell inviting me to top up my SMS account.  After a split second consideration I realised I did not need them anymore.  Sorry Clickatell!

Twitter is more convenient.  I have set up a few private accounts and subscribed to them through my own.  When an event occurs I receive notification direct to my phone as a free SMS message direct from twitter.

Although twitter has been unreliable lately it has proven more convenient than using Clickatell.  In time twitter will fix the problems and they may even be suitable for mission critical solutions.  I hope so because they are easy to use and should spawn many superb product ideas all designed to keep us informed with the information we want now, not just when we visit facebook.




© 2011 Martyn Walker | Software Architect | Hiker And Hacker Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha