What is it?
A web-based curation system that uses your social networks to figure out what your friends/colleagues are discussing and delivers it to you in a daily feed.
How it works:
After signing up for Percolate (currently by request only), users are asked to link their accounts to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr to receive a composite of their social connections. Each day, Percolate delivers an email digest of articles to your inbox, based on what your contacts are discussing. The clean, user-friendly interface provides a clear list of articles and shared content to peruse. Users can then indicate what they thought of the content (Interesting/Win/Awesome/Fail, or create your own word), “like” the content, add a comment or image and tweet it.
(Recently, the focus at Percolate has shifted from consumer-focused solutions to brands and media companies, so this functionality may change.)
Why it’s cool:
It provides a quick way to glance at what is going on the world, which is useful for folks who follow a lot of different types of feeds.
Real-world application:
Percolate is a fairly self-contained community on the consumer side. On the business side, however, there are some interesting collaborations brewing with companies like American Express and Reuters.
Reuters partnered with Percolate in September to create Counterparties, an experiment to see if readers would appreciate reading financial news coverage through the lens of two specific reporters. There is a crowd-sourcing aspect to this as well; readers can contribute to the conversation on the right side of the page; the “best” of the curated material makes the main site on the left.
Use it for:
Keeping track of multiple streams of information; getting on “an information diet”.
Caveat: This platform is only as good as the people you follow and the articles you like. If there aren’t enough people using Percolate, the results are skimpy. Percolate is also undergoing a pivot, and focusing on business side solutions – so this functionality may change.
Platform:
Web / iPhone / Android