Browsing on a mobile or tablet can be painful. Its hard to type, and simple things like copy-paste are hard. On the other hand, mobiles - with their touch interfaces are extremely amenable to discovery and exploration.
Pugmarks aims to solve exactly this - reduce the pain of searching inside a browser, by anticipating information needs - and bring them to them, all in real time, inside of the comfort of the browser.
Pugmarks is like having Google Now inside the browser.
Pugmarks.me is like a Google Now, but optimized for news and blogs. It mines topics that are moving through your context, and tries to do "educated serendipity". Available for Chrome on laptops, and soon on Android.
When you are on the browser, you can do a lot more with that context. Try http://pugmarks.me - done by ex-Google News engineers.
It gives you related news when you visit a LinkedIn profile, related articles for anything - works especially well for long shelf life content. Next, your New Tab is converted into a mirror of your recent interests, where experts on the topic you are reading are shown.
Many times you have excellent articles come and go in your subscribed streams. Pugmarks indexes them and surfaces them again - in the right context, and increases the shelf life of good quality content. Hope its useful to you.
I'd love the HN community to review this product. We are ex-Google News, Microsoft Research, thats trying to build the ultimate discovery product for your browser.
Pugmarks is social search too. It indexes documents going through your social circles and makes it available in the right context.
Pugmarks works great on LinkedIn profiles - giving you news and articles about a person, or interesting to the person.
Pugmarks extracts themes to your browsing, and makes your New Tab a mirror of the ideas going through your mind.
At http://pugmarks.me/, we have constantly pondered how news has to be delivered to you, to be most useful and effective. We recently launched our New Tab extension for Chrome - that learns patterns in your browsing and suggests just the right news for you. Here's how a day in your life may look like:
a) You start by reading Edward Snowden's Q&A.
b) You start hacking around and start reading on MongoDB optimization.
c) You recall you have a meeting with a VC. You visit his LinkedIn profile to look for some talking points.
After all this, how should the New Tab on a browser look like? How would you like a browser that can understand what you are doing, anticipate your news needs and serve exactly that?
Thats what Pugmarks.me does. Give us a try. Would love your feedback.
The article takes a primordial approach to what news is. Technology and media have long addressed this problem, and news is really free now - thanks to Blogger, Google News, Twitter and the like.
Its also an irony that most of us discover our news on a site like Hacker News, and are seconding an opinion that news has become bad.
Some ways to rethink news:
1) News should be an ambient thing. It should be around you, and relate to what you are doing, where you are, who you are, and the people you care about.
2) The good things you do today must reflect in what you receive as news tomorrow.
3) News can be seen as appealing to the producer or consumer in you. When you read something just for infotainment, its for the consumer. When you read something, and you go like - this can help me, its helping the producer. We should strive to tilt the balance of news, and make it more productive - for you.
Pugmarks aims to solve exactly this - reduce the pain of searching inside a browser, by anticipating information needs - and bring them to them, all in real time, inside of the comfort of the browser.
Pugmarks is like having Google Now inside the browser.