The Shared Web: Making curators of us all

Some of the hottest companies I've seen this year are either content presentation companies like Paper.li or Flipboard, or content curation systems, like Pearltrees, Storify, and Curated.by. But today The Shared Web is going to change my ideas about everything.

"We decided to start The Shared Web in order to solve a problem that we noticed that we were having," says Kareem Amin, co-founder. "Something that we always talked about is, 'What are you reading? What are you looking at online?' What we realized is that what each other is reading is extremely interesting to us, and not enough of it is being shared on Facebook or Twitter, perhaps because people don't want to flood each other. What we decided to do is to build a platform for social curation that allows people like me and my friends to do just that."

The Shared Web uses an elegant flipping motion, like Flipboard, but it only curates shared web content, not status updates or random tweets. Then you get access to a highly targeted experience, by selecting the topic you want to read about. "We pull in the sharing that's happening on Twitter and Facebook, we organize it into different topics, and then we show it to you in a beautiful layout," says Amin. "We know that people are already sharing on these sites, but the core idea is to democratize curation, the same way that blogging democratized writing. It opened up for everybody. We want to open up the curation for everybody. And by curation, I mean seeing something that's interesting, and recommending it to the right audience through a topic."

Amin is aware that he's standing on the shoulders of giants—and he's glad to be there. "What we're really excited about is that today's the perfect time for this: in order to build our product, we needed somebody to figure out the social graph," he says. "Facebook and Twitter have already done that. Lots of thanks to them for that. We can build on top of what they've done, and start figuring out what is the interest graph, and start to personalize the web for you."

More information:
The Shared Web site: http://www.thesharedweb.com/
The Shared Web profile on Crunchbase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/the...
Kareem Amin on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kareemamin