No, that isn’t a typo in title - Repliqa is the name of a new service (not live yet) created by Mark Seremet. You can visit his blog The Fish, where he is describing the journey as he develops Repliqa. Mark is your standard serial entrepreneur - best know for starting Take Two (or should I say - notorious) - traded under the symbol TTWO. But that is in the past - the future is agent based, as per Mark. Okay, the word agent is a term that invokes a good deal of angst for me. The concept of an agent is really simple, but people seem to give it way more meaning that it deserves. An agent can be as simple as a filter in Outlook for directing emails to the correct folder. Useful - yes, but golly - I just hate that term.

Now that I have gotten that out of my system, I do have to say I am excited about Mark’s project. If you can take a couple of minutes to watch a video describing Repliqa, then you will get a pretty good jist of the problem and how Mark’s service works towards solving it. Basically, the problem is most services like Digg, Google, YouTube all use popularity to push content to users. Since “popularity” is by definition what appeals to the “average” person - if you are not average, the content will not appeal to you. Repliqa is trying to avoid “popularity” by capturing information about your likes and dis-likes to help push the content to you that you will most appreciate. Insert the appropriate buzzwords like “learning”, “distributed computing” and (of course) “agents”, but it still sounds like fun. Mostly I appreciate the fact that Mark describes StumbleUpon as the “best discovery engine” he has found to date. I agree Mark - good luck with Repliqa!