Basic principle: Listas, a technology from Microsoft’s Live Labs that’s now available for preview, aims to help users organize all their online data into lists.
Listas

Communications

How to Organize the Web

Microsoft proposes a simple solution to the problem of information overload: lists.

  • Friday, November 2, 2007
  • By Erica Naone

There are dozens of online tools for organizing information: wikis, social-bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, and RSS feed readers, among other things. Researchers at Microsoft's Live Labs, an incubator for new Internet-related technologies founded in 2006, hope that a tool called Listas will distinguish itself by being more general than all the others. Listas launched at the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and is available for preview online.

Listas is, put simply, about making lists. Users can make their own lists, by either typing in original content or taking clippings from Web pages, or they can read or edit public lists. The lists can include almost any type of content, including images and videos. They can be designated either public or private, and they can be tagged to make them easier to search.

Like other social-networking sites, Listas also allows users to acknowledge each other as "friends." A user's lists, lists made by his or her friends, and public lists that the user has linked to are all collected on a single page on the Listas site. Downloading and installing the optional Listas toolbar, which is built to work with Internet Explorer, makes it easy to grab items from other Web pages and add them to lists. Those items might include short bits of text, URLs, or blog posts or product listings with their original structure intact.

"Lists are a fundamental data type across the Web," says Live Labs product manager Alex Daley. "Whether you look at task managers, blogs, RSS, shopping lists, or wish lists, they share a simple, linear list structure. A great deal of the information we produce and consume across the Web is in this structure." Similarly, says Daley, the virtue of Listas is its generality: it allows users to organize data in whatever way they want and begin to tease out trends.

Advertisement

Gary Flake, founder and director of Live Labs, says that Listas was born from his sense that his information online was no longer under his control. "There was just an awareness I had that my data was spread out everywhere," he says, noting that the more involved a person is with online communities, the more severe this problem can be. By using the Listas toolbar, a person can aggregate all of his or her contributions to online communities in a single dashboard, annotate them, and share them with others. Although a similar effect could be achieved without the toolbar, Flake says that he thinks the system will feel incomplete without the ease that the toolbar contributes to the process.

Other companies have tried to address the problem of organizing data with more specific tools. ZingLists, for example, shares some features with Listas, including the ability to make lists private or public. It is intended, however, as a productivity tool, according to its developer, Steve Madsen. The lists on ZingLists take the more traditional form of to-do lists, while Listas's lists can behave like to-do lists, blogs, or RSS feeds, depending on how users construct them.

Print

Related Articles

Making Search Social

A new engine can turn a difficult search into a communal quest.

Web Mashups Made Easy

Software being developed at Intel makes it easy for people with no programming experience to combine data from different Web pages.

Between Friends

Sites like Facebook are proving the value of the "social graph."

Close Comments

To comment, please sign in or register

Forgot my password

tam

3 Comments

  • 1566 Days Ago
  • 11/02/2007

Listas vs. Others

How does Listas differ in purpose from other programs--for example Google Notebooks, which seems to do pretty much the same thing?  Or for that matter Microsoft's own OneNote, which is not online but does permit sharing?

Reply

daleyalex

1 Comment

  • 1566 Days Ago
  • 11/02/2007

Re: Listas vs. Others

Listas differs from those particular applications in a number of subtle ways, but the primary difference is the social community. 

Becuase of the community elements and the fact that Listas is not vertical specific, the graph develops to show trends in things like bookmarks, as well as what kinds of domains items are clipped from, what search terms are frequently saved, what primary content developed on the site is most popular and much more. 

So, Listas is more about a tool that is both productive and social in a simple and useful way.

Reply

grogers

1 Comment

  • 1565 Days Ago
  • 11/03/2007

Re: Listas vs. Others

The lists concept is not new.

A "beneath the radar" startup called MyProps.org (http://www.myprops.org) has already done a killer job implementing "lists" (they call them "channels") - channels are user created, can be about any topic, and either public or private.

Reply

conway

1 Comment

  • 1563 Days Ago
  • 11/05/2007

Re: Listas vs. Others

Listas is interesting.  It addresses a problem caused by the proliferation of useful websites – how to keep track of everything (that’s useful to you).

We recently launched Xerpi.com with a similar goal – to make the internet personally relevant.

Our approach is less free form than Listas.  We focus on bookmarks.  Storing is like other sites but organization users more intuitive drag and drop features.  Sharing is done many ways but the most unique is by creating communities of links. 

One way relevancy is achieved is by connecting like minded individuals as defined by their favorites.  This creates social connections like Listas that is missing in other productivity type sites. 

A big difference in our approach to these connections is that the actual ‘physical’ connections are done by leveraging other social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Rather than create another network we wanted to identify connections via bookmarks inside current networks or even across current networks, i.e. connect a LinkedIn user to a Facebook user. 

It’s great to see others working on this similar problem.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Reply

mollymeghanmiller

1 Comment

  • 1456 Days Ago
  • 02/20/2008

Re: Listas vs. Others; Xerpi= Best

Great point, Conway.
I am a Xerpi user, and I really appreciate it's organic layout. Unlike most of the competitors, it isn't in a list (or linear) form. Xerpi is a great tool for managing my favorites, and also finding new interesting sites through the public views and through my social network- the friend blocks that I have set up on new tabs. The two navigation tools are pretty efficient too- I like the post0to Xerpi because it eliminates excess clicks while surfing.

Reply

Advertisement

MAGAZINE

Can We Build Tomorrow's Breakthroughs?

Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.

Advertisement

Technology Review Lists

TR50

Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:

Novomer

A123 Systems

Groupon

Suntech

More

Advertisement

Facebook

Advertisement