Our First Real Attention Service: Root Vaults Launches

It's very cool to be able to announce the launch of Root Vaults, the first actual "attention service" to make use of the data captured by the AttentionTrust Extension. (The Acme Attention Service that's been available for the past few weeks is fictitious service we set up as a proof of concept.)

If you've already downloaded the Extension, you can opt to share your data with Root Vaults by opening Firefox and going to Tools > Attention Recorder Options > Approved Services and checking the box for Root Vaults. If you're a new user, you can select Root Vaults by clicking on their link when you download the Extension.

Root Vaults is still in beta, but I've been using it for the past few days, and I'm truly impressed. It basically provides you with three views of your browsing activity:

1. A chronological Clicklist of the sites you've visited.
2. A list of Trends, meaning the domains you've visited, ranked by the number of visits.
3. And a list of Topics, which organizes the domains you've visited into categories, such as Reference, Arts and News.

OK, that's great--so what? Well, for starters it's just fascinating to be able to see where my attention is going. Who knew that 11.47% of my visits were to this site? Or that 1.83% of visits were to Sports Illustrated? Or that 1.26% of my visits were to Delicious? I'm not exactly sure how I'll make use of this information--spend less time at Sports Illustrated?--but I'm sure that having it will have an impact on my behavior.

And looking ahead, I know that Root Vaults (which is led by Seth Goldstein, a member of AttentionTrust's Board of Directors) is planning to offer users a variety of services based on their attention data. (Niki Scevak attented a Meetup that Seth hosted in NYC recently and blogged about it recently.)

We're already talking with other attention service providers, and we expect to make more available within a few weeks. In the meantime, I hope you'll try out Root Vaults and share your feedback with us both via email and on our wiki.