why :
Why use the Intention Cloud? What for?
Because you've always wanted to know what other people were thinking, haven't you?
There are multiple ways to use the Intention Cloud, this version of the Cloud being an experimental territory open for you to play. What you could do with it is mostly up to you, as we haven't discovered yet its full potential in terms of usage.
We firmly believe that it could be useful for activities involving market research, such as market analysis, search engine optimization, investigations etc. It can also be very handy for a researcher to get a quick overview of a how a subject is generally approched by the public. But it's also just plain fun to generate clouds, and can sometime be insightful. Or sad. Or both.
Why did you create this?
We did it all for the lulz!!
Hu.. sorry, that was an attempt to perform some Humor2.0 ;)
It also outlines that our approach is mostly driven by curiosity and fun. Mashups of services and concepts are very trendy these days, and are a one of the pillars of the so-called Web2.0 new era. We wanted to add a brick to the building. But with style.
The core of the concept came from our IRC channel, were we run some bots to answer some on-the-fly commands, like catching and submitting our URLs to del.icio.us automatically, checking the rankings of our MMORPG characters, performing queries on search engines etc. One of the modules we created grabs results from Google Suggest, and is called using the command "!suggest keyword". The fact that we had a weighted list as an output for that tool lead to the idea of formatting the results using a 'tag cloud' like design pattern.
Franck created a prototype, and we had a lot of lulz playing with it. And we knew it was right. Our designer then got a grasp of the tag cloud concept, and interpreted it literally. He imagined a really nice layout for the tool, putting a lot of effort into bringing a sense of beauty and design in this so 2.0 project.
Note also that we are conviced that such tools should be used by everybody, to understand what Intentions are, what they represent, and what companies possessing the huge Databases of Intention can do with those.
John Battelle wrote in his chapter introducing this concept something that everybody should read and understand, and then look again at the current big players of the web industry : "What does the world want? Build a company that answers this question in all its shades of meaning, and you've unlocked the most intractable riddle of marketing, of business, and arguably of human culture itself."
You can watch Google Current, and get brainwashed, or watch the Clouds, and relax.
And here we are, releasing our Intention Cloud for the public to experiment with, and observing what will happen. We expect a lot of constructive criticism and nice ideas to come from this prototype, and are looking forward to reading your comments (by mail or on the Intention Cloud blog).
