Cleary Gottlieb is not using iLink, although they probably should be! What’s different about iLink is precisely that it learns and adapts incrementally, in nearly real time and at large scale, as information flows in any given community (however defined). We develop highly nuanced models of people and things that change over time as those people and/or things interact, inferring and inducing links. Think “strength of weak ties” writ very large and very deep.

The point is to power a new generation of smarter applications that adapt to social context and user needs. The medium evolves from passive Web “social network” to a community that’s active, aware, and adaptive. The result (we hope) are smarter communities that can swarm needs quickly and leave behind higher quality artifacts of that collaboration for future reference.

The form our apps take sometimes looks familiar – like context-aware recommendations. But what’s powering them and the resulting behavior they instigate in the community are quite different.

And yes, we too think lawyers are a natural Social Kinetics end-user community. Stay tuned…

Very best,
David