Social media can be a boon for keeping up with personal and business information, but given the number of tools available, feeds can also be a major time sink. That's why entrepreneur Shivani Khanna developed
dasBoom, a data visualization application that helps users cut down on the noise and focus on what's important in a feed rather than what's simply new.
Khanna's venture is exactly the type of "intrapreneur" strategy that's often encouraged at tech firm
W3i, where Khanna has acted as a software development manager before taking on her own projects. The company fosters incubator projects like these in order to encourage creativity and development growth.
Given its strong start, and large market potential, it's likely that dasBoom is ready to, well, boom. "With the enormous volume of information being generated on social networks, there's a critical need to make sense of all this connected knowledge," Khanna notes. With the tool, users will be able to make more intelligent decisions, she adds.
The application allows users to visualize information from their data feeds, and then organize and filter that content. For example, the app will show which friends have posted in the last few hours, and the user can choose how people should be ranked in terms of importance. Also, the app will show the popularity of those posts so that the user can get a quick glimpse of the amount of buzz being generated.
This strategy gives users the ability to focus on content that's most relevant to them, rather than wading through posts containing game requests or shared articles and photos.
Khanna notes that the app is unique compared to other applications that curate social content, because it doesn't create assumptions about what's important. Instead, it lets users decide what to filter out and what to keep. The app is currently for Facebook, but she anticipates that Twitter and LinkedIn will be covered in the near future.
Source: Shivani Khanna, dasBoom
Writer: Elizabeth Millard