When turbo power kicks in

Remember the days, when cars got turbo-charged engines? This certain feeling of "so what" while stepping on the accelerator, until the point, when turbo-power kicked in abruptly and you felt the car take-off? Quite a déjà-vu to my early experiences with Refinder:

A few weeks ago I installed Refinder for the first time. I consider myself as a web-worker, having thousands of files stored on my harddisk, keeping gigabytes of emails in outlook and having left quite a decent digital footprint across various online services like Flickr, Evernote or Del.icio.us. I was curious, how Refinder would impact my working habits and eventually improve my permanent juggling between online and local data sources.

Refinder started to harvest filenames from my local folders, it sucked in the subject lines of mails passing through my system. I started to create things and topics and to link them together. With only a few hundred things in my account I was a little bit vague about the recommendations, that Refinder returned me, felt hopeful but still a bit empty, resembling those full-throttle occasions in my old car, moments away befor the boost.

And then it took off. The power kicked in once the del.icio.us-to-Refinder importer was launched. Thousands of bookmarks and their related tags from my Del.icio.us- account instantly populated Refinder and all of a sudden, things came together, literally. Del.icio.us bookmarks turned into Refinder things, tags turned into Refinder topics. With a few clicks, Refinder mirrored years of work and reflected all my fields of interest. Search, recommendations, keywords, diversity of data sources.

It got clear to me, that Refinder´s usefulness to me grew exponentially with the volume of things living in it, similar, it benefitted tremendously from the build-up of explicit and implicit relations between things. The large-size import of bookmarks had helped me to get beyond that critical mass of inputs that really unleashed the power of the Refinder application. Glorious, like back then in the days, when cars got turbo-charged engines.

I am Franz Jachim and I work on business development for Refinder. This is also my first blog post at Gnowsis.