The Anti-Google
haxel.ca
haxel.ca
My intention was to spark a discussion on the high-level ideas, but it seems that many are more interested in the implementation. That's fair. The challenge in this case is that "what it is" matters less than "where it's going" or "why it exists".
In a nutshell: First choose a thread of action - narrow your view to one set of things you already do. Then when you act, you record that you took that action. Add more threads-of-action as you wish, organize as needed. That's the beginning of Benome. This pattern remains throughout as the fundamental.
This simple pattern allows Benome to become an interactive visualization that combines your past behaviour with probabilities for you future behaviour. A very simple example is that if your chosen thread of action was when you buy tomatoes, and then you choose to share that thread with someone who sells tomatoes, they'd know when you were ready to buy. But that same pattern can be used for many more applications than simple commerce. You can leverage a detailed awareness of your own behaviour into many personal advancements.
To care about "where it's going" or "why it exists", we NEED to know "what it is". There are some things for which their purpose or direction is completely unimportant, there are some things for which they are important. To know which "this" is, it is essential to know what "this" is.
The page describes this as the result of blue sky thinking - it seems to me that this is not the result of blue sky thinking, but is itself blue sky thinking. There seems to be no solid description of what it is or does, just some very vague sentiments.
There is talk of it working offline; how powerful must one's personal computer be in order to perform the magnitude of calculations required to accurately predict future actions from past actions?
Do you propose me personally selling the predictions of my future actions to others? And/or sharing these predictions with my friends/family? What purpose is there for me to do either? Other than monetary gain, is there some greater purpose that I might wish to sell predictions of my future actions?
The whole thing seems extremely vague. I think some more concrete examples of how the system would work, and what the benefits are, would be useful.
As a sidenote, the site suggests that the sole purpose of many "free" products is to sell your details and make money from you; perhaps this is the case for many products, but I would like to believe that in at least some cases, the main focus is providing the best product possible, for the best price possible. Meaning money has to come from somewhere, and advertising is the only real way to monetize a free product right now.
When the person taking the action is recording the action, and the information is kept private, then it's what I consider to be high quality information, even at very low levels of detail. Contrast this with the quality of information that ad networks get (it's lesser). Given that low-quality information the usual situation, I completely understand why you think that it takes a large amount of computing power to make useful predictions from it. I've found that the situation is greatly simplified when dealing with high quality information.
Don't talk about why your idea has merit. Show it.
EDIT: & it's gone.