It’s been about six weeks since we launched and the first thing we want to tell all of you is “Thanks for your warm reception!”.
For the last 16 months, we’d been in stealth mode working on our idea. It had been a lonely sort of experience, working in isolation and unable to get feedback from the world at large. We have to admit that we had a small sense of trepidation when we launched: Would other people find Pluribo to be as cool and useful as we thought it was?
From all the e-mails, twitters, blogs, and mainstream press coverage we’ve received since then, it seems that the resounding answer is “Yes!”. In fact, we were so overwhelmed that we thought we’d share a few of the highlights:
* On twitter, GreenSmith called us a “godsend”, and gubatron said he “thinks that watching Pluribo’s demo is a glimpse of what the semantic web will bring”.
* In the blogosphere, it was a thrill to be acknowledged by TechCrunch, who described us as the “CliffsNotes for Amazon reviews”, and by ReadWriteWeb who appreciated our “accurate summaries” and thought of us as “akin to a Zagat review”.
* The hyper-intelligent communities at MetaFilter, LifeHacker, and Slashdot also weighed in, giving us some excellent support and feedback.
* But perhaps our favorite of all these articles was the one written over at Ars Technica by David Chartier, who had a very forward-looking perspective on our technology. David wrote, “Pluribo is on to something with this summarization engine” and predicted that summarization techniques like ours might one day be invaluable in taming information overload on the web. He imagined, “I can see all kinds of other consumer applications for things like long Wikipedia entries and even articles like the one you’re reading.”
On that note, there’s no better way to end this blog entry. Thanks again for all your kind words and we can’t wait to show you what else we have up our sleeves!
