Facebook has transformed how we keep tabs on friends, by training people to constantly publish short status updates about the delicious meal they just ate or the killer vacation they just took. A site called Wavii opened to the public earlier this week that wants to do the same thing for topics, with short bursts of news on everything from corporate acquisitions to celebrities.
Sure, Facebook gives people some ability to follow topics. Your friends post links to news articles that alert you to events like Whitney Houston's death or the outcome of a Republican primary. There are Facebook fan pages for bands that tell you when they are touring and releasing a new album. But it's hard to rely on either for a comprehensive view of topics — an interesting story may escape the attention of Facebook friends, and the band you are following may choose not to post links to unflattering news or reviews about them on their fan page.
"Facebook did really nail staying on top of your friends," said Adrian Aoun, the chief executive and founder of Wavii. "No one has done that for staying on top of topics."
Wavii, based in Seattle, works by scouring the Web, including news sites, Twitter and blogs, for news about a vast number of topics. It then automatically creates the equivalent of a status update on the topic that summarizes the news, often in just one sentence, with a link to the full story on the site from which the news originated. Wavii users see a Facebook-like feed with updates on all the news topics they follow.
Using machines, rather than human editors, to summarize the news in a faithful way is a big technical challenge, according Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, who is also an adviser to Wavii. "They have state-of-the-art information extraction technology which allows them to do this is," said Mr. Etzioni, who is a specialist in the field of artificial intelligence.
Sometimes the automated summary sentences for news events that pop up on Wavii are downright goofy. Take this one from Feb. 23, which linked to an article about the chief executive of Apple, Timothy D. Cook: "Tim Cook is considering paying Apple Inc shareholders a dividend after realizing how much cash the company has."
While Mr. Cook certainly was considering such a move — and Apple later followed through with a dividend for shareholders — it is downright comical to think he did so after just "realizing" Apple had a lot of cash ("Holy cow, we have $100 billion in the bank!").
Although it misses nuances, Wavii gets the gist of news events across. It has a nice feed, for example, that lists acquisitions by companies in a straightforward way.
Mr. Aoun said Wavii's technology was designed to improve as time goes on. "Occasionally it's wrong but it gets much better," he said. "It's an ever-learning technology."
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