If you are one of those who live on heavy diet of information feeds from lot of sources and face difficulty in managing them, Particls can be of great interest to you.

Particls, being termed as an "Alerts Platform" by its founders, is definitely more than a simple newsreader or a widget.  It is an alert engine which makes it easy to keep track of relevant information and keeps you informed while you are engaged in your primary activities.  The types of alerts vary from desktop ticker, pop-up alerts, emails and SMS messages.  You can choose to have different types of alerts depending upon the importance level of information.

Its main principle, "The policy of Diminishing Attention Consumption" has been put to use in three main components of the system called "Input Adapter", "Personal Relevance Engine" and "Output Adapter".  The input adapters collect information from various sources as defined by the user. Its Personal Relevancy Engine determines the level of importance of each item, and it invokes the right output adapters for presenting the information to the user.  The theory of "Diminishing Attention Consumption" has been explained in the image below.

You can define and customize the level of personal relevance of information by typing and ranking keywords and sources.  You can also allow Particls to scan your hard drive periodically to auto-detect topics of interest to you (This feature is optional).  Once allowed, the information from your documents, conversations, emails and browsing history is used by Particls to rank the level of importance.

There is a developer and website publisher angle to Particls as well which allows for re-branding, re-skinning, creating new adapters, distributing content and revenue sharing.

Overall, it is a very useful application and solves the information overload problem by providing different options for attention management.  It will be interesting to see how developers make various applications using Particls platform.