Note: This blog post describes the current alpha release of Primal Fusion. If you don’t already have one, we invite you to request a free alpha account now.

The current release of Primal Fusion’s thought networking service is an early first step. In some respects, it’s more of a concept prototype than a fully-fledged product. So when we say it’s an alpha release, we really mean it! Given this, we thought it would be helpful to provide an orientation so you know how to get started after signing in.

Before jumping into the details, a few words about the big picture.

Primal Fusion helps you quickly pull together information about broad subjects from several popular sources on the Web. It does this by first summarizing related thoughts about a subject of interest, then encouraging you to make selections that describe how you think about the subject. Armed with this knowledge, Primal Fusion can act on your thoughts to help you get stuff done online. Currently, one action is available. It creates one-of-a-kind websites (like this one) that organize the information you’ve collected, using your thoughts as a blueprint. These websites are a great resource about the subjects you’re interested in - and they’re easily shared with other people.

The remainder of this blog post outlines a process we recommend for using Primal Fusion in its current form. If you have questions or experience problems, please check our discussion forum to either seek or share more information.

1. Type a few words to describe what you’re thinking about.

After signing in, begin by typing a few words in response to the question, What are you thinking about? Press Enter or click the checkmark when you’re done. Please note that sentences aren’t well supported at this time, so limit your response to two or three keywords.

To illustrate this recommended workflow, let’s use the example of Sarah, a college student.

Sarah needs to write an assignment about the relationship of economics and climate change. She begins by thinking about climate change, as you can see below. (Click these images to zoom in)

2. Explore related thoughts from Wikipedia and “remember” any of interest.

Primal Fusion acts like a brainstorming partner in step two. Your objective is to build a “thought cloud” in the upper panel that expresses how you’re thinking about the subject of interest. You do this by exploring ideas in the lower panel, then selecting any that represent your thinking.

Primal Fusion has read through thousands of articles on Wikipedia about the subject of climate change and summarized their main ideas for Sarah. Sarah then selected some of those ideas on the lower panel and clicked Remember selected thoughts. They now appear in her thought cloud in the upper panel.

To further explore any thought you’ve remembered, simply click it. The bottom panel updates in response. You may continue selecting and remembering additional thoughts, helping Primal Fusion to better understand what you’re thinking about.

3. If your thought cloud is missing something, type it in the bottom panel.

If something’s missing from your thought cloud, type it in the field labeled Explore another thought on the bottom panel and press Enter. Primal Fusion will generate more candidates for your thought cloud.

Sarah typed economics to brainstorm for related ideas in the lower panel. Below, you can see that she has remembered some of the results. Her thought cloud better expresses the topic of her assignment now, because it includes thoughts related to economics.

4. Check out the content items you’ve collected along the way.

Every time you remember a thought, Primal Fusion saves examples of related content items in the background. Click the Content tab to see what you’ve collected. These items illustrate the ideas in your thought cloud.

Sarah has collected 42 snippets from Wikipedia articles.

5. Collect more content items by switching to a different source.

After you’ve built a thought cloud, Primal Fusion better understands the particular way you’re thinking about a subject. It can now help you find appropriate information from other sources such as Yahoo! and Flickr. To do this, select content from the Explore related dropdown, then select a different source to explore, as shown below.

Sarah decides to look for recent news stories by exploring Yahoo! News. Yahoo! returns a large number of results, so Primal Fusion uses the semantic data that underlies Sarah’s thought cloud to identify stories that align with her thinking. Sarah may select and remember any that interest her.

6. Create a website to explore your thoughts and share them with other people.

When you’re finished building a thought cloud and collecting content items, it’s time for the final step: acting on your thoughts. In step three, Primal Fusion will provide a growing collection of software agents that can help you perform a variety of tasks online. In this release, there’s one agent. Click Create a website to activate it.

Sarah calls her website Climate change and economics, then clicks to show a preview. This one-of-a-kind website has been generated using Sarah’s thoughts as a blueprint, and will be a useful resource for her assignment. Click here to visit Sarah’s website!

Primal Fusion hosts your website on publicly accessible servers. You can share it with other people even if they don’t have an alpha account. Note that you aren’t associated with this website in any way: people will know it’s yours only if you tell them!

Where to go from here

The design and capabilities of Primal Fusion will improve rapidly in the coming months. We’ll keep you up to date after each release, so stay tuned. If what you’ve seen here interests you, please sign up for a free alpha account so you can try it first-hand.

As you experiment with this release of Primal Fusion, you’ll undoubtedly think of questions, encounter issues, and come up with suggestions. We’d love to hear from you! Please visit our discussion forum and chime in with your thoughts. We’re automatically notified of new posts to the forum and respond as quickly as we can. Technical issues usually get a response within a couple hours.

Tags: demonstration, documentation, orientation, Primal Fusion, screenshots, Thought networking, walkthrough