Noovo and Plinky... Next Wave of Publishing Tools for Lazy People

I recently got an invite to Noovo, which is an interesting content publishing play. ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus aptly called it "tumblr on steriods." When I first tried it out, I immediately thought "the child of Tumblr and Digg."

I like where Noovo going because it provides a filter for the growing streams of content from the vast digital world along with a publishing platform that you can share with your friends or the general public. It allows for lazy people like me to easily find and share their discoveries from the web or personal content from their blog, Twitter, Flickr and other multimedia services. One way they make it easy is on their "cover" page where you can see a list of articles, choose one that you want to post and share, and then just click to add it to your Noovo profile. For an example, you can view my profile here.

Founded by Slovenian entrepreneurs, it seems they have angel money from Esther Dyson, or she at least sits on their advisory board. Noovo's user interface isn't as simple as Tumblr's and they need a critical mass but are worth tracking.

Another lazy man's publishing tool is Plinky. Founded by Jason Shellen, a former Googler and Blogger guy. Plinky presents questions for you to answer, and then you can share them on Facebook, Twitter or your Plinky profile. They label these questions "prompts" and have a "Prompts" page that presents a new question every day. Again I like where this is going because it helps you generate content.

Interactive TV in the 90's was all about "lazy interactivity" because they discovered people (at least U.S. consumers) are lazy asses who didn't want too much complexity in their viewing choices or feature sets. Not many people really wanted to shop while they watched TV, pause, click on an actor's sweater, and then order it. You can still have a thousand channels and keep things simple. With a good filter and clean user interface, choices can be easily made and you can have a happy, lazy customer.

So Noovo and Plinky brings Web 2.0 back to this "lazy interactivity" model of consumer behavior since it syncs with the majority of web users and not the ten percent of users that like to work at their content creation.