TechCrunch
Agolo Aims To Algorithmically Curate Your Twitter Feed
For all the good it’s capable of, Twitter is all too often a cacophonous mess of marketers, celebrities, talking heads, and friends who all like to jabber at the same time. Sage Wohns and Mohamed Altantawy are co-founders of a New York startup called Agolo, and as far as they’re concerned, not every bit of information pouring forth from that social firehose is worth paying attention to. Instead, they want to home in on just the stuff that’s important to you and make sure you see if before it’s too far gone to catch up with.
Sounds logical enough. After all, if you’re up to your neck in a Twitter debate centered around, I don’t know, whether the Palm Pre was a bigger smartphone flop than the BlackBerry Z10, you’re probably not going to pay much attention to the snarky quips your followers are flinging at each other. That’s where Agolo comes in.
Co-founder Sage Wohns showed me an incredibly early version of Agolo several months ago, and it bears very little resemblance to the service the team ultimately hopes to bring to the masses. The original concept saw users tweeting the @agolo Twitter account asking for advice on local venues and happenings — as long as you defined a location in the tweet or enabled the proper location settings, you’d almost immediately receive a reply with three of the most popular options nearby.
To their credit, the service still works rather well (I used it to track down some lunch the other day), but the pair have bet the startup’s future on the notion that people often miss the things that they care most about because of the sheer volume of tweets being sent and delivered every second. It’s madness. But Wohns and Altantawy are conducting a private beta for the new Agolo, which quietly keeps tabs on your Twitter followers, the people you follow, and the things you talk about the most.
By gathering that information and chewing on it with the help of some clever natural language processing algorithms, Agolo is able to cobble together a profile of you that includes your preferred topics of conversation and the sorts of events that you like. The real gist of the revamped Agolo is that it’s able to sift through all that stuff in realtime, so you’re ultimately left with a mobile web app (native apps are said to be in the works) displaying a curated feed of tweets that align with what Agolo thinks your interests are.
If you’re a big music fan for instance, all of your friends’ tweets mentioning upcoming concerts will be flagged for your perusal. There’s one more hook, though: while the service highlights relevant conversations and events that you may otherwise miss, the team also wants to make it easy to take action. Going back to that concert example, Agolo will be able to provide links to ticket vendors so users can close the loop that much faster.
Sounds like a pretty natural way to make money, right? Since Agolo can highlight certain trends or events and make it easy for users to jump in and engage with them, Wohns said that they’re starting to build up “key affiliate partnerships to monetize some of the actions we recommend.”
At this point though, there’s one major drawback to the Agolo system — it only works with Twitter. It’s not a bad place to start considering how the service facilitates conversations and sharing at a breakneck pace, but it only accounts for a fraction of the social conversations that take place at any given moment. Ultimately, the small team hopes to be able to digest Facebook and LinkedIn messages, along with that bane of my existence: email. I suspect it’ll be quite some time before they manage to get that far, but they may just be on the right track.
Airbnb Victory In NYC: Environmental Control Board Reverses $2,400 Fine On Renting Out A Room In An Apartment
A big regulatory victory for Airbnb today: the company has managed to win an appeal in New York City over a fine against a host called Nigel Warren, whose landlord was fined $2,400 in June after Warren rented out a room in his apartment. If the fine had stuck, it would have set a business-threatening precedent for Airbnb in the city.
“This decision was a victory for the sharing economy and the countless New Yorkers who make the Airbnb community vibrant and strong. As I said last summer, the sharing economy is here to stay, and so are we,” David Hantman, Airbnb Global Public Policy Director said today in a statement.
Earlier this year, Airbnb provided legal support to Nigel Warren in the case against him, when a judge decided that Warren was violating rules on short-term rentals by listing a room in his apartment on Airbnb. As Ryan pointed out at the time, those laws were originally designed not for small-scale room lets like the kind on the peer-to-peer site, but for landlords who would buy up property to list spaces as hotels. Essentially, the law made renting out space for less than a month illegal.
There have been exceptions made for shared spaces, and Warren apparently hadn’t been much of a power-hoster, but Warren’s landlord had been fined anyway (and Warren took the costs upon himself).
When Airbnb announced its participation in the case earlier this year, it said it would be in it for the long haul, even going so high as the trial courts — although it hasn’t come to that in the end.
The bigger picture here stands on two levels:
First, how and if Airbnb can leverage this win into a bigger play for more regulatory clarification on city and state levels in New York and beyond. This is something the company — like Uber, another groundbreaker that is changing the game for how services are consumed and sold — continues to work on trying to achieve.
Second, if those rule changes don’t come quite as fast as Airbnb hopes, will Airbnb continue to stand by the side of its users to help defend them?
The ruling from the New York City Environmental Control Board is embedded below. Airbnb’s statement is below that.
Huge Victory in New York for Nigel Warren and Our Host Community
(David Hantman)In June, I wrote about Nigel Warren, a New York host who was fined by an administrative law judge for renting out a room his apartment for a few days. I said at the time that the decision was clearly wrong on the law and bad for New York, and we were proud to support Nigel and his landlord as they appealed this ruling over the past few months. Yesterday, the New York City Environmental Control Board reversed Nigel’s fines, agreeing with our arguments and delivering a major victory for Nigel, New York and the Airbnb community.
In the appeal, we and Nigel argued – and the appeal board now agrees – that under New York law as long as a permanent occupant is present during a stay, the stay does not violate New York’s short term rental laws. Much of the New York law is confusing, with some provisions applying to certain buildings and not to others. But this shared space provision was crystal clear. We intervened in this case because the initial decision on Nigel’s case was so clearly wrong, and we are pleased to see that the Board agreed.
We know there is more work to do. This episode highlights how complicated the New York law is, and it took far too long for Nigel to be vindicated. That is why we are continuing our work to clarify the law and ensure New Yorkers can share their homes and their city with travelers from around the world.
But in the meantime, this decision was a victory for the sharing economy and the countless New Yorkers who make the Airbnb community vibrant and strong. As I said last summer, the sharing economy is here to stay, and so are we.
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