Particls: How To Deal With Information Overload

Particls is a new application that can help you deal with “information overload” from all the news and info provided by your various RSS feeds as well as from other sites and applications, including those that run locally on your computer. More than just a news reader, Particls is more of an alerts platform, or perhaps you could describe it as a filtered news reader, only showing you alerts for items that are useful or important to you. With Particls, you subscribe to your favorite sites and you’re notified when they change, but Particls knows how important the new information is to you, and displays a proportional alert. Alerts from the service can come to you in different ways - for example, general information can be displayed on a news ticker, more important items might display as a popup alert, and urgent information could be SMS’d to your mobile phone. But how does Particls know what is important to you?  To start off, you can tell it what’s important to you by typing in and ranking keywords and sources. Also, you can allow Particls to scan your hard drive from time to time to auto-detect topics you care about (by scanning your files, conversations, emails and sites you visit). However, that is feature is optional and if you do choose to permit it, they guarantee your privacy. Particls can also determine an item’s importance using what they refer to as their “secret recipe,” which takes other factors into consideration, like how popular a particular item is on the internet at large and how current the item is. Best of all, this new app is ad-supported, so it’s completely free. However, there is a paid version available if you would prefer to not see the ads.

I installed Particls, to test it out myself. The news ticker is pretty cool, but it’s killing my CPU, so I wouldn’t recommend using this on anything but a fast, newer computer (which, unfortunately, my Inspiron is not). I haven’t gotten a pop-up and I never entered my cell number, so I don’t know how the SMS feature would work. Another problem I had with it is that, while it seemed to find some interesting content for me to read, I was surprised to see to links scroll by that looked like old news. To be sure, I opened them up in browser, and, sure enough, they were from 2005! I also noticed that stories from the same website seemed to scroll by one after another in chronological order. If I’m going to read feeds from one website in order, I may as well use my current feed reader. Still, if they work all the kinks out, I can see the potential in an app like this.