Nouns!

Aboard is designed to turn web things into cards. It knows about books, for example (say, on bookshop.org), and about movies and TV shows. It displays running time and other data for them. It handles products well, too—it does its best to find prices. 

But this week we rolled out…places! Starting with Lodging (hotels). So when you are planning a trip to Philadelphia (a great city) you can keep track of all the hotels and Airbnbs and Vrbos and such, and we’ll do our best to extract price, pet ratings, etc. Try it out! More kinds of places are coming soon. Our goal is to make it easy for people to plan a trip together regardless of their levels of organization. As I’ve noted before, every relationship has the one person who organizes things in complicated systems (Notionistas) and another person who will put links into chat and that’s it (WhatsAppians), and that’s why we exist: To bring peace between them.

I should actually go a little deeper here: One function of Aboard is to stop people from fighting all the time. This is why the collaboration focus is on small groups. It’s why sharing publicly is very opt-in, and when you publish, chat remains private (comments are public though). Everyone should have the ability to run their mouths off with their peers or friends.

Having taken a big swing at things and places, that leaves one category of noun: People. People, as you know, are very tricky! Since so much of the bad web is about spidering huge collections of people to sell them (or their data), those collections of people (like social media and resume sites) are very resistant to data extraction (unless you’re Google). But we’ll keep wrestling with it, and we’ve already made a ton of progress. More on this soon…