My Initial Thoughts on Persai
January 31, 2008 at 5:00 pm by Chris
This week, I heard that a new startup, Persai, was going to be opening up invite-only beta testing. While I waited for approval of my invite request, I went to the Persai blog to get any additional information I could before used it. In a post titled, "What is Persai," Ted writes:
Persai is a content aggregator that is specific to your interests. You specify a topic that you're interested in with a few words, and Persai will find new content relevant to that interest and recommend it to you. As you use Persai, it learns about you, and can better recommend content to you. Recommendations are based entirely on content, other users' feedback has no bearing on what Persai recommends to you.The Persai homepage has a more "markety" version of this explanation: "Persai is an intelligent agent who finds content that is relevant to your interests. You tell it what you're into, and it will find some stuff that you might like. The more you use Persai, the more it understands your interests. Persai recommends content for you and you alone. No other user's feedback influences its decisions."After playing with this tool a bit, I can definitely say that it has potential, though it needs work. It seems to offer similar functionality to what you can do by creating an RSS feed for Google blog search results (I wrote about this recently in Building Your Online Reputation), except that Persai's results do not seem to be limited to blog posts. 
Persai allows you to set up your interest groups by specifying any word or group of words that describe your interest. You can then label this interest. For example, I created an interest using the words "time travel, future, past, parallel universes, wormholes" and labeled it "time travel." I also set up another interest with only "web design" and labeled it "web design." I wanted to see if the results would vary depending upon how complex your word group is. Incidentally, both groups retrieved only about 4 results for each, so I set up another group with only one word, "technology," and labeled it "technology." This group retrieved about 20 results. As of this writing, the results have not grown. I'm not sure why they are so spare. I also noticed recurring urls in my results, which makes me wonder what unknown factors may skew even a general search. 
I'm not sure how Persai "learns about you." There is a feature to 'reject' a result that Persai delivers to you, but there is no indication of how this would impact future searches. Does it just remove a snippet from your results list, or does it actually affect your interest profile (similar to when you reject a song that pops up in a station you configure on Pandora)?When you set up an interest, the site takes a while to retrieve results. In fact, as of this writing, my last three entries never completed. I added two identical entries to see if they would come up with the same results, and they never got passed the "building" phase. This makes me wonder if the duplication uncovered a bug in the site. Unfortunately, if an interest entry is still "building," you cannot delete it from your profile. I also noticed that when you update the words you assemble for an interest, the results don't update or change at all. Overall, there seem to be enough significant issues with the site to hinder it's potential from shining through. Perhaps from a flurry of beta-testing activity, the site is also quite slow and I encountered many error messages as I tried to navigate through my interest groups. I'll be interested to see where this application goes, and if they expand to introduce any "social" features. |
Tags: social-media software google search
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Comments 
 Kyle Shank |
February 1, 2008 7:23 PM Hey Chris, You were the winner of our fail over the past few days. We're working through the growth and finding the bugs. We've rolled out a bunch of updates over the past two days addressing the issue you ran into with creating interests. Shoot me an email and we'll fix up your account (theres a reason you can't delete a building interest): kyle@persai.com Thanks for being a beta tester and taking the time to give it a look. |
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Chris |
February 4, 2008 9:33 AM Kyle, Thanks for posting. I'm impressed by how quickly you noticed this post and commented- it shows that you and the rest of the Persai team must really value feedback. I'm about to email you, but just wanted to thank you here first. - Chris |