illumio is a tool that makes it easier to stay informed and connected with RSS feeds, websites, social networks and communities of interest by using your observed behaviour to help manage information.  So, for instance, it can:

• scan through the hundreds of feeds I subscribe to, and surface the postings that might be of interest to me.
• help me find information I need by directing requests I create to only those people in my social network who might actually be able to help. 
• help me find people I need to connect with by identifying people in my social network who might be able to facilitate an introduction. 

illumio is a downloadable application.  Running on your PC, it scans your email, address book, and documents folders to learn what you think is important.  Then it matches incoming information requests, RSS feeds, and so on against its observations of your behaviour, and surfaces the items it thinks you might be most interested in for you to act upon. 

You can add RSS feeds to illumio and have it prioritize information based on that criteria.  You can join a group where individuals with like interests can add RSS feeds, and still have illumio prioritize that information based on what it has observed about you.  You can also send a request for information to a group, or to other individuals that illumio has identified who might have related interests to a group. 

If a request is sent to a group where you are a participant, illumio will use the same filtering criteria to determine whether to present that request to you.  You don’t get innundated with requests. Even better, as a requestor you don’t have to stop to think about whether or not you’re sending so many requests that you might be accused of spamming.  Only those who can help you actually see the requests. 

I. a departure from social networking applications like LinkedIn, illumio accomplishes all of this while preserving anonymity and privacy.  Since the information collection and management happens on the desktop, illumio doesn’t need to store any of your information in the network.

Even though it’s beta software, it’s very very good.  Some of the features I would like to see added:

• Allow me to upload my address book rather than inviting people one at a time.  There are a lot of people I would like to invite to illumio.  It’s too hard right now.
• Give me more choices for tweaking the filtering criteria. It works well, but I’d like to be able to make finer grained adjustments.
• I work on multiple computers.  Send me an email notification when the computer doing illumio processing receives a new response to a request.