How does Infovark work?

Infovark runs on your local Windows computer. It collects information and publishes shared content. Unlike a traditional social network, where all the content is hosted at somebody else’s server, Infovark shares content directly from your desktop. When you visit a friend’s Infovark, you’re actually navigating directly to their computer.

When you install and run Infovark, it will collect content on your machine. By default, it will look in common places that people who work with Windows tend to store things, such as your desktop, calendar and inbox.  (Of course, you can control where Infovark looks.)

When Infovark finds interesting information, it will create a web page on your machine and assign it a unique URL. It will also make a back up, summarize the content, and automatically tag it with what it thinks are the most appropriate keywords. No uploading, no forms, no extra work — Infovark organizes your information for you.

As these pages are created, and you and your colleagues use your Infovark as a reference and knowledge share, Infovark learns more about the kind of work that you do and the people you work with. The Infovark Affinity Engine runs in the background and makes your Infovark smarter — so that it becomes better at suggesting related content, remembering things that you care about, and processing new stuff.

A word about security

All of the content that Infovark finds in these initial stages is kept private, and not shared until you choose to share it. When you do choose to share information, it’s only available inside your organization — no information is ever sent to the Internet, or to anyone without you knowing about it.  After all, it’s your content — you can do what you like with it, right?

Currently Infovark only supports Public or Private content — although we’re thinking about some cool ways to create default Ad-Hoc groups based on the way people work.

Publishing

Infovark publishes your content through its own personal HTTP service, and makes it available in several formats:

• the nice looking HTML one,
• an XML version, for use by other websites and systems
• a JSON version, which can be used by other websites
• an ATOM RSS feed, which can be subscribed to by you or your friends using an RSS reader.

Having flexible technical formats and an API  makes it possible for you to extend Infovark to feed information into your corporate portal, intranet, social sharing system.

After all, we’re too busy to upload and catalog documents and emails. We think having Infovark do this work for us is a real time-saver.

Peers

If your Infovark finds another Infovark on your network, you can choose to add them as a peer. If you do, you can search their infovark when you search your own — and the two Infovarks will ‘compare notes’ when it comes to determining relevance and relationships between pieces of information.

What sort of content does Infovark work with?

Currently Infovark processes all Microsoft Office Files and PDFs. It also does well with text files and zip files. It can also read Outlook email, tasks and calendar items.

You can have Infovark process other kinds of files, too, although you might get slightly weird results — particularly for files with no text in them. We may support image, audio and video formats in the future.

How did two guys manage to do all this?

Well, lots of coffee. And no sleep.  But we had lots of help — we wrote Infovark in C#, using Visual Studio.NET and some other really nifty tools provided from Microsoft as part of our partner arrangement. We also used lots of great open source components, like the Lucene indexing tool, the Firebird RDBMS and a host of commercial components that made our life much easier.  The Infovark Underground chronicles some of our favorite experiences developing Infovark over the last two years.

But what about…?

We know you have a bunch of questions that you want to know the answers to. But this pseudo-FAQ has gone on long enough. Drop us a line at info@infovark.com — we promise to get back to you!