The BBC World Service's Business Daily show interviewed the CTO of Xerox and me, about the future of the Web, printing, newspapers, search, personalization, the real-time Web. Listen to the audio stream here. I hear this will only be online at this location for 6 more days. If anyone finds it again after that let me know and I'll update the link here.
The next generation of Web search is coming sooner than expected. And with it we will see several shifts in the way people search, and the way major search engines provide search functionality to consumers.
Web 1.0, the first decade of the Web (1989 - 1999), was characterized by a distinctly desktop-like search paradigm. The overriding idea was that the Web is a collection of documents, not unlike the folder tree on the desktop, that must be searched and ranked hierarchically. Relevancy was considered to be how closely a document matched a given query string.
Web 2.0, the second decade of the Web (1999 - 2009), ushered in the beginnings of a shift towards social search. In particular blogging tools, social bookmarking tools, social networks, social media sites, and microblogging services began to organize the Web around people and their relationships. This added the beginnings of a primitive "web of trust" to the search repertoire, enabling search engines to begin to take the social value of content (as evidences by discussions, ratings, sharing, linking, referrals, etc.) as an additional measurment in the relevancy equation. Those items which were both most relevant on a keyword level, and most relevant in the social graph (closer and/or more popular in the graph), were considered to be more relevant. Thus results could be ranked according to their social value -- how many people in the community liked them and current activity level -- as well as by semantic relevancy measures.
In the coming third decade of the Web, Web 3.0 (2009 - 2019), there will be another shift in the search paradigm. This is a shift to from the past to the present, and from the social to the personal.
Here's an idea I've been thinking about: it's a concept for a new philosophy, or perhaps just a name for a grassroots philosophy that seems to be emerging on its own. It's called "Nowism." The view that now is all there is.
Certainly we have all heard terms like Ram Das's "be here now" and we may be familiar with the writings of Eckhart Tolle and his "Power of Now" and others. In addition there was the "Me generation." Lately there is a shift towards the real-time Web, what I call the Stream.
These are all examples of the emergence of this trend. But I think these are just the beginnings of this movement -- a movement towards a subtle but major shift in the orientation of our civilization's collective attention. This is a shift towards the now, in every dimension of our lives. Our personal lives, professional lives, in business, in government, in technology, and even in religion and spirituality.
I have a hypothesis that this philosophy -- this worldview that the "now" is more important than the past or the future, may come to characterize this new century we are embarking on. If this is true, then it will have profound effects on the direction we go in as a civilization.
A very good article about Twine.com has come out in Fast Company, June issue, in print and online. It calls Twine "red hot" and even mentions some hints about Twine 2.0 that I gave the reporter.
The Web is changing faster than ever, and as this happens, it's becoming more like a stream. Sites no longer change in weeks or days, but hours, minutes or even seconds. Soon if we are offline even for a few minutes we may risk falling behind, or even missing something absolutely critical.
In the 1990's the metaphor was the idea of "Webs." In the first decade of the 2000's it's been social networks and graphs. As we move into the second decade of the 21st century, the new metaphor may be The Stream.
I've written an article which explores the question of whether there are design principles for designing better communities. This is an important social problem our civilization must solve. Soon.
I wrote an article that explores questions about the relationship between science and religion, and age-old questions about the nature of the universe and the question of whether or not God exists. It turns out that science and religion may actually converge at a deeper level.
We've integrated Twine and Twitter so you can "tweet what you twine" -- it's surprisingly easy and cool. Try it!
I've written an article about the growing need for filtering and metadata in Twitter.
The Web is 20 years old this month. The third decade of the Web has started. This means we are officially in Web 3.0 now. Web 2.0 is finished. Read more about this definition of Web 3.0 as the third-decade of the Web, here.
I've written a new article about how content distribution has evolved, and where it is heading. It's published here: http://www.siliconangle.com/social-media/content-distribution-is-changing-again/.
Stephen Wolfram is building something new -- and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google was, but for a different purpose.
Stephen was kind enough to spend two hours with me last week to demo his new online service -- Wolfram Alpha (scheduled to open in May). In the course of our conversation we took a close look at Wolfram Alpha's capabilities, discussed where it might go, and what it means for the Web, and even the Semantic Web.
Challenges Twitter Will Face
As I think about Twitter more deeply, one thing that jumps out to me is that in each wave of messaging technology, the old way is supplanted by a new way that is faster, more interactive, and has less noise. And then noise inevitably comes again and everyone moves to a new tool with less noise. This is the boom and bust cycle of messaging tools on the Web. Twitter is the new "new tool" but inevitably, as Twitter gains broader adoption the noise will come. I see several near-term challenges for Twitter as a service, and for the community of Twitter users:
Spam. So far I have not encountered much real, deliberate, spam on Twitter. The community does a good job of self-policing, and the spammers haven't figured out how to co-opt it. Most of what people call spam on Twitter is inadvertent from what I can tell. But the real spammers are coming and that is going to be a serious challenge for Twitter's relatively simple social networking and messaging model.What is the Twitter community going to do when all the spam and noise inevitably arrives?
Mainstream Users. Currently Twitter seems a bit like the early Web, and the early blogosphere -- it is mostly an elite group of influencers and early adopters who have some sense of connectedness and decorum. But what happens when everyone else joins Twitter? What happens when the mainstream users arrive and fill Twitter up with more voices, and potentially more noise (at least from the perspective of the early users of Twitter) than it contains today.
Keeping Up. Another challenge that I see as a new user of Twitter is that it is very hard to keep up with what so many people are tweeting effectively and I get the feeling I miss a lot of important things because I simply don't have time to monitor Twitter at all hours. I need a way to see just the things that are really important, popular or likely to be of interest to me, instead of everything. I'm monitoring a number of Twitter searches in my Twitter client and this seems to help. I also monitor Twitter searches and certain people's tweets via RSS. But it's a lot to keep up with.
Conversation Overload. Secondly its difficult to manage conversations or to follow many conversations because there is no threading in the Twitter clients I have tried. Without actual threading it is quite hard to follow the flow of conversations, let alone multiple simultaneous conversations. It seems like a great opportunity for visualizaton as well -- for example I would love a way to visually see conversations grow and split into sub-threads in real-time.
Integration Overload. As an increasing number of external social networks, messaging systems, and publishing engines all start to integrate with Twitter, there will be friction. What are the rules for how services can integrate with Twitter -- beyond the API level, I am talking about the user-experience level.
How many messages, of what type, for what purpose can an external service send into Twitter? Are there standards for this that everyone must abide by or is it optional?
The potential for abuse, or for Twitter to just fill up to the point of being totally overloaded with content is huge. It appears inevitable that this will happen. Will a new generation of Twitter clients with more powerful filtering have to be generated to cope with this?
These are certainly opportunities for people making Twitter clients. Whatever Twitter app solves these problems could become very widely used.
The World is Getting Faster
In the world of Twitter things happen in real-time, not Internet-time. It's even faster than the world of the 1990's and the early 2000's. Here's an interesting timeline:
Why Your Brand or Company Should be Watching Twitter
Messages spread so virally and quickly in Twitter when they are "hot" that there is almost no time to react. It's at once fascinating to watch, and be a part of, and terrifying. It's almost too "live." There is no time to even think. And this is what I mean when I say that Twitter makes the world faster. And that this is somewhat scary.
If you have an online service or a brand that is widely used, you just cannot afford to ignore Twitter anymore. You have to have people watching it and engaging with the Twitter community, 24/7. It's a big risk if you don't. And a missed opportunity as well, on the positive side. My company is starting to do this via @twine_official on Twitter.
People might be complaining about you, or they might be giving you compliments or asking important questions on Twitter -- about you personally (if you are a CEO or exec) or your company or support or marketing teams if they are on Twitter. Or they might be simply talking about you or your company or product.
In any case, you need to know this and you need to be there to respond either way. Twitter is becoming too important and influential to not pay attention to it.
If you wait several hours to reply to a developing Twitter flare-up it is already too late. And furthermore, if your product and marketing teams are not posting officially in Twitter you are missing the chance to keep your audience informed in what may be the most important new online medium since blogs. Because, simply put, Twitter is where the action is now, and it is going to be huge. I mean really huge. Like Google. You cannot ignore it.
Who has Time for Twitter?
But who has time for this? Nobody. But you have to make time anyway. It's that important.
It was bad enough with email and Blackberries taking away any shred of free time or being offline. But at least with Email and Blackberries you don't have to pay attention every second.
With Twitter, there is a feeling that you have to be obsessively watching it all the time or you might miss something important or even totally vital. Positive and negative flare-ups happen all the time on Twitter and they could develop at any moment. You need to have someone from your company or brand keeping tabs on this so you are there if you need to be. Being late to the party, or the crisis, is not an option.
It appears that monitoring and participating in Twitter is absolutely vital to any big brand, and even the smaller ones. But it's not easy to figure out how to do this effectively.
For a Twitter newbie like me, there is a bit of a learning curve. It's not easy to figure out how to use Twitter effectively. The basic Web interface on the Twitter Website is not productive enough to manage vast amounts of tweets and conversations. I'm now experimenting with Twitter clients and so far have found TweetDeck to be pretty good.
Please read this article which explains what Twine is, what makes it unique, and what it is for.
Why is Twitter Different From What's Come Before?
I pride myself on being on top of the latest technologies but I think I unfairly judged Twitter a while back. I decided it wasn't really useful or important; just another IM type tool. Chat-all-over-again. But I was wrong. Twitter is something new.
Intro
Because we think Twitter is important, my company has been working on integrating Twine with Twitter. Last week we soft-launched the first features in this direction.
It turns out there is some room for improvement to our implementation of Twine-Twitter integration -- which many Twitterers have pointed out. This has really opened my eyes to the power and importance of Twitter, and also to how different the Twitter-enabled world is going to be (or already is, in fact).
Before last week, I never really paid much attention to Twitter, relative to other forms of interaction. In order of time-spent-per-medium I did most of my communication via email, face-to-face, SMS, phone, or online chat. I had only used Twitter lightly and didn't really know how to use it effectively, let alone what a "DM" was. Now I'm getting up to speed with it.
I have had an interesting experience this week really immersing myself in Twitter for the first time. It hasn't been easy though. In fact it has been a real learning-experience, even for a veteran social media tools builder like myself!
You can see a bit of what I'm referring to by following me @novaspivack on Twitter and/or searching for the keyword "twine" or the hashtag #twine on Twitter, and by viewing a recent conversation on Twitter between myself and the popular Twitterer, Chris Brogan @chrisbrogan.
Twitter changes everything. My world, and in fact The World, have just changed because of it. And I'm not sure any of us are prepared for what this is going to mean for our lives. For how we communicate. For how we do business. The world just got faster. But most people haven't realized this yet. They soon will.
In this article I will discuss some observations about Twitter, and why Twitter is going to be so important to your brand, your business, and probably your life.
Why is Twitter Different From What's Come Before?
I pride myself on being on top of the latest technologies but I think I unfairly judged Twitter a while back. I decided it wasn't really useful or important; just another IM type tool. Chat-all-over-again. But I was wrong. Twitter is something new.
What is Twine?
Before I explain the potential for integrating Twine and Twitter, and what I've observed and learned so far, I'll explain what Twine is, for those who don't know yet.
Twine is a social network for gathering and keeping up with knowledge around interests, on your own and with other people who share your interests.
Twine is smarter than bookmarking and interest tracking tools that have come before. It combines collective intelligence of humans plus machine learning, language understanding and the Semantic Web.
For example, suppose you are interested in technology news. You can bookmark any interesting articles about tech that you find into Twine, for your own private memory, and/or into various public or private interest groups (called "twines") that are for collecting and sharing tech news on various sub-topics. The content is found via the wisdom of crowds.
But that is just the beginning. The real payoff to users for participating in Twine is that it automatically turns your data into knowledge using machine learning, language understanding, and the Semantic Web.
Twine is Smart
What makes Twine different from social bookmarking tools like Delicious, or from social news tools like Digg, StumbleUpon and Mixx? The difference is that Twine is smarter.
Twine learns what you are interested in as you add stuff to it, by using natural language technology to crawl and read every web page you bookmark, and every note or email you send into it. Twine does this for individuals, and for groups.
From this learning Twine auto-tags your content with tags for related people, places, organizations and other topics. That in itself is useful because your content becomes self-organizing. It becomes easier to see what a collection is about (by looking at the Semantic tags), but you can quickly search and browse to exactly what you want.
Twine also learns from your social and group connections in Twine. By learning from your social graph, Twine is able to infer even more about who and what you might be interested in. This learning -- about your Semantic graph and your Social graph in Twine -- results in personalized recommendations for things you might like.
Finally, like Twitter, Twine helps you keep up with your interests by notifying you whenever new things are added to the twines you follow. You can get notified in your Interest Feed on Twine, or via our daily email digests, RSS feeds, and soon by following Twine activity in Twitter (Coming Soon).
Twine and Twitter -- Different yet Complementary
Twitter is for participating in discussions. Twine is for participating in collections of knowledge. They are quite different yet complimentary. Because of this I think there is great potential to integrate Twine and Twitter more deeply.
Both services have one thing in common: -you can share and follow bits of information with individuals and groups -- except Twine is focused on sharing larger chunks of knowledge rather than just 140 character tweets, and it also adds more value to what is shared by semantically analyzing the content and growing communal pools of shared knowledge.
Whereas Twitter is largely focused on sharing messages and brief thoughts about what you're doing, Twine is for collecting and sharing longer-form knowledge -- like bookmarks and their metadata, and metadata about videos, photos, notes, emails, longer comments.
There is a difference in user-intent between Twitter and Twine however. In Twitter the intent is to update people on what you are doing. In Twine the intent is to gather and track knowledge around interests.
Twitter + Twine = Smarter Collective Intelligence
Twitter's live discussions plus Twine's growing knowledge and intelligence could eventually enable a new leap in collective intelligence on the Web. We could use the analogy of a collective distributed brain -- a Global Brain, as some call it.
In that (future) scenario, Twitter is the real-time attention, perception and thinking and Twine is the learning, organizing, and memory behind it. If linked together properly they could form a kind of feedback loop between people and information that exhibits the characteristics of a vast, distributed intelligent system (like the human brain, in some respects).
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the coming Global Brain, and speaking about it to others. Twitter + Twine may be a real step in that direction. It is one route to how the Web might become dramatically more intelligent.
By connecting the real-time collective thinking of live people (Twitter), with Web-scale knowledge management and artificial intelligence on the backend (Twine) we can make both services smarter.
Our Near-Term Twitter Integration Plan
Big futuristic thoughts aside, our near-term goals for integrating Twine and Twitter are much more modest.
Difficult First Step
Phase 1 of Twine-Twitter integration has had a few hiccups however.
For this phase, we enabled our users to invite their Twitter followers to connect with them on Twine, and to join their twines, from inside of Twine. This sends an invite message as a direct message ("DM" -- a private tweet) from the user's Twine account to whichever Twitter followers they select to connect with.
But the wording of our invite message came off as too impersonal and some Twitter users mistook it for a bot-generated ad rather than a personal invitation from one of their followers.
Also we had an unexpected bug that resulted in the tweet URL taking the user tologin or join Twine, but not eventually landing them at a page where they could connect to a friend or join the group they were invited to..
(*** Note: The hiccups will be fixed by Thursday of this week. The wording of the invite message and the bugs will be fixed in a patch release. We are also thinking about ways to modify this feature to be less noisy on Twitter).
We have certainly had a few complaints on Twitter about the way this feature is (not) working right now. Thankfully most of the comments have been positive, or at least understanding. We're very sorry to anyone who was annoyed by the invite message seeming like an ad.
That said, we believe that we'll have this fixed and working right very soon, and this should cut down on the annoyance factor. We're open to suggestions however.
Flare-Ups Happen In Minutes On Twitter
Ordinarily a seemingly minor wording issue and bug like what I have described above would not be a problem and could wait a few days for resolution. But in the case of Twitter all it took was one very widely followed Twitterer (@chrisbrogan) to tweet that he was annoyed by the invite message today and a mini-firestorm erupted as his followers then re-tweeted it to their followers and so on. The cascade showed the signs of becoming a pretty big mess.
Fortunately I was alerted by my team in time and replied to the tweets to explain that our invite message wasn't spam, and that fixes were in process. Chris Brogan and his followers and others were quick to reply and fortunately they were understanding and appreciative of our transparency around this issue. The transcript is here.
This situation ended well because we were quick and transparent, and because Chris and his followers were understanding. It didn't turn into a PR nightmare. But it could have.
What worries me is what if nobody on my team had been watching Twitter when this happened??? We might have been toast. In a matter of minutes, literally, tens of thousands of people might have become angry and it would have taken on a life of its own.
Why Your Brand or Company Should be Watching Twitter
Messages spread so virally and quickly in Twitter when they are "hot" that there is almost no time to react. It's at once fascinating to watch, and be a part of, and terrifying. It's almost too "live." There is no time to even think. And this is what I mean when I say that Twitter makes the world faster. And that this is somewhat scary.
If you have an online service or a brand that is widely used, you just cannot afford to ignore Twitter anymore. You have to have people watching it and engaging with the Twitter community, 24/7. It's a big risk if you don't. And a missed opportunity as well, on the positive side. My company is starting to do this via @twine_official on Twitter.
People might be complaining about you, or they might be giving you compliments or asking important questions on Twitter -- about you personally (if you are a CEO or exec) or your company or support or marketing teams if they are on Twitter. Or they might be simply talking about you or your company or product. In any case, you need to know this and you need to be there to respond either way. Twitter is becoming too important and influential to not pay attention to it.
If you wait several hours to reply to a developing Twitter flare-up it is already too late. And furthermore, if your product and marketing teams are not posting officially in Twitter you are missing the chance to keep your audience informed in what may be the most important new online medium since blogs. Because, simply put, Twitter is where the action is now, and it is going to be huge. I mean really huge. Like Google. You cannot ignore it.
But who has time for this? It was bad enough with email and Blackberries taking away any shred of free time or being offline. But at least with Email and Blackberries you don't have to pay attention every second. With Twitter, there is a feeling that you have to be obsessively watching it all the time or you might miss something important or even totally vital. Positive and negative flare-up happen all the time on Twitter and they could develop at any moment.
It appears that monitoring and participating in Twitter is absolutely vital to any big brand, and even the smaller ones. But it's not easy to figure out how to do this effectively. For a Twitter newbie like me, there is a bit of a learning curve. It's not easy to figure out how to use Twitter effectively. The basic Web interface on the Twitter Website is not productive enough to manage vast amounts of tweets and conversations. I'm now experimenting with Twitter clients and so far have found TweetDeck pretty good.
The World is Getting Faster
In the world of Twitter things happen in real-time, not Internet-time. It's even faster than the world of the 1990's and the early 2000's. Here's an interesting timeline:
Challenges Twitter Will Face
As I think about this one thing that jumps out to me is that in each wave of messaging technology, the old way is supplanted by a new way that is faster, more interactive, and has less noise. But as Twitter gains broader adoption the noise will come.
Spam. So far I have not encountered much real, deliberate, spam on Twitter. The community does a good job of self-policing, and the spammers haven't figured out how to co-opt it. Most of what people call spam on Twitter is inadvertent from what I can tell. But the real spammers are coming and that is going to be a serious challenge for Twitter's relatively simple social networking and messaging model.What is the Twitter community going to do when all the spam and noise inevitably arrives?
Mainstream Users. Currently Twitter seems a bit like the early Web, and the early blogosphere -- it is mostly an elite group of influencers and early adopters who have some sense of connectedness and decorum. But what happens when everyone else joins Twitter? What happens when the mainstream users arrive and fill Twitter up with more voices, and potentially more noise (at least from the perspective of the early users of Twitter) than it contains today.
Keeping Up. Another challenge that I see as a new user of Twitter is that it is very hard to keep up with what so many people are tweeting effectively and I get the feeling I miss a lot of important things because I simply don't have time to monitor Twitter at all hours. I need a way to see just the things that are really important, popular or likely to be of interest to me, instead of everything. I'm monitoring a number of Twitter searches in my Twitter client and this seems to help. I also monitor Twitter searches and certain people's tweets via RSS. But it's a lot to keep up with.
Conversation Overload. Secondly its difficult to manage conversations or to follow many conversations because there is no threading in the Twitter clients I have tried. Without actual threading it is quite hard to follow the flow of conversations, let alone multiple simultaneous conversations. It seems like a great opportunity for visualizaton as well -- for example I would love a way to visually see conversations grow and split into sub-threads in real-time.
Integration Overload. As an increasing number of external social networks, messaging systems, and publishing engines all start to integrate with Twitter, there will be friction. What are the rules for how services can integrate with Twitter -- beyond the API level, I am talking about the user-experience level.
How many messages, of what type, for what purpose can an external service send into Twitter? Are there standards for this that everyone must abide by or is it optional?
The potential for abuse, or for Twitter to just fill up to the point of being totally overloaded with content is huge. It appears inevitable that this will happen. Will a new generation of Twitter clients with more powerful filtering have to be generated to cope with this?
These are certainly opportunities for people making Twitter clients. Whatever Twitter app solves these problems could become very widely used.
Conclusion
I am still just learning about Twitter but already I can tell it is going to become a major part of my online life now. I'm not sure whether I am happy about this or worried that I'm going to have no free time at all. Maybe both. It's a new world.And it's even faster than I expected. I don't know how I will cope with Twitter, but I have a fascination with it that is turning into an obsession. I guess all new Twitter users go through this phase. The question is, what comes next?
One thing is for sure. You have to pay attention to Twitter.
Erick Shonfeld at TechCrunch has written an article that totally blew my mind about how Twitter and "real-time search" could challenge Google, and just might be the new frontier in the search war.
If you are interested in semantics, taxonomies, education, information overload and how libraries are evolving, you may enjoy this video of my talk on the Semantic Web and the Future of Libraries at the OCLC Symposium at the American Library Association Midwinter 2009 Conference. This event focused around a dialogue between David Weinberger and myself, moderated by Roy Tennant. We were forutnate to have an audience of about 500 very vocal library directors in the audience and it was an intensive day of thinking together. Thanks to the folks at OCLC for a terrific and really engaging event!
If you are interested in collective intelligence, consciousness, the global brain and the evolution of artificial intelligence and superhuman intelligence, you may want to see my talk at the 2008 Singularity Summit. The videos from the Summit have just come online.
(Many thanks to Hrafn Thorisson who worked with me as my research assistant for this talk).
Twine has been growing at 50% per month since launch in October. We've been keeping that quiet while we wait to see if it holds. VentureBeat just noticed and did an article about it. It turns out our January numbers are higher than Compete.com estimates and February is looking strong too. We have a slew of cool viral features coming out in the next few months too as we start to integrate with other social networks. Should be an interesting season.
Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting post today, which cites one of my earlier diagrams on the future of the Web. His diagram is a map of two types of collective intelligence -- collective human intelligence and collective machine intelligence. It's a helpful view of where the Web is headed. I am of the opinion that the "One Machine" aka the Global Brain will include both humans and machines working together to achieve a form of collective intelligence that transcends the limitations of either form of intelligence on its own. At Twine we are combining these two forms of intelligence to help people discover and organize content around their interests.(Thanks to Kevin for citing Twine)
In this interview with Fast Company, I discuss my concept of "connective intelligence." Intelligence is really in the connections between things, not the things themselves. Twine facilitates smarter connections between content, and between people. This facilitates the emergence of higher levels of collective intelligence.
I've Twined a new article on How to Build the Global Mind, here.
I've blogged about some interesting Twine stats that show positive user engagement trends, that beat several leading sites -- here on my Public Twine (which is where I actually do most of my blogging these days).
UPDATE: There's already a lot of good discussion going on around this post in my public twine.
I’ve been writing about a new trend that I call “interest networking” for a while now. But I wanted to take the opportunity before the public launch of Twine on Tuesday (tomorrow) to reflect on the state of this new category of applications, which I think is quickly reaching its tipping point. The concept is starting to catch on as people reach for more depth around their online interactions.
In fact – that’s the ultimate value proposition of interest networks – they move us beyond the super poke and towards something more meaningful. In the long-term view, interest networks are about building a global knowledge commons. But in the short term, the difference between social networks and interest networks is a lot like the difference between fast food and a home-cooked meal – interest networks are all about substance.
At a time when social media fatigue is setting in, the news cycle is growing shorter and shorter, and the world is delivered to us in soundbytes and catchphrases, we crave substance. We go to great lengths in pursuit of substance. Interest networks solve this problem – they deliver substance.
So, what is an interest network?
In short, if a social network is about who you are interested in, an interest network is about what you are interested in. It’s the logical next step.
Twine for example, is an interest network that helps you share information with friends, family, colleagues and groups, based on mutual interests. Individual “twines” are created for content around specific subjects. This content might include bookmarks, videos, photos, articles, e-mails, notes or even documents. Twines may be public or private and can serve individuals, small groups or even very large groups of members.
I have also written quite a bit about the Semantic Web and the Semantic Graph, and Tim Berners-Lee has recently started talking about what he calls the GGG (Giant Global Graph). Tim and I are in agreement that social networks merely articulate the relationships between people. Social networks do not surface the equally, if not more important, relationships between people and places, places and organizations, places and other places, organization and other organizations, organization and events, documents and documents, and so on.
This is where interest networks come in. It’s still early days to be clear, but interest networks are operating on the premise of tapping into a multi--dimensional graph that manifests the complexity and substance of our world, and delivers the best of that world to you, every day.
We’re seeing more and more companies think about how to capitalize on this trend. There are suddenly (it seems, but this category has been building for many months) lots of different services that can be viewed as interest networks in one way or another, and here are some examples:
What all of these interest networks have in common is some sort of a bottom-up, user-driven crawl of the Web, which is the way that I’ve described Twine when we get the question about how we propose to index the entire Web (the answer: we don’t. We let our users tell us what they’re most interested in, and we follow their lead).
Most interest networks exhibit the following characteristics as well:
This last bullet point is where I see next-generation interest networks really providing the most benefit over social bookmarking tools, wikis, collaboration suites and pure social networks of one kind or another.
To that end, we think that Twine is the first of a new breed of intelligent applications that really get to know you better and better over time – and that the more you use Twine, the more useful it will become. Adding your content to Twine is an investment in the future of your data, and in the future of your interests.
At first Twine begins to enrich your data with semantic tags and links to related content via our recommendations engine that learns over time. Twine also crawls any links it sees in your content and gathers related content for you automatically – adding it to your personal or group search engine for you, and further fleshing out the semantic graph of your interests which in turn results in even more relevant recommendations.
The point here is that adding content to Twine, or other next-generation interest networks, should result in increasing returns. That’s a key characteristic, in fact, of the interest networks of the future – the idea that the ratio of work (input) to utility (output) has no established ceiling.
Another key characteristic of interest networks may be in how they monetize. Instead of being advertising-driven, I think they will focus more on a marketing paradigm. They will be to marketing what search engines were to advertising. For example, Twine will be monetizing our rich model of individual and group interests, using our recommendation engine. When we roll this capability out in 2009, we will deliver extremely relevant, useful content, products and offers directly to users who have demonstrated they are really interested in such information, according to their established and ongoing preferences.
6 months ago, you could not really prove that “interest networking” was a trend, and certainly it wasn’t a clearly defined space. It was just an idea, and a goal. But like I said, I think that we’re at a tipping point, where the technology is getting to a point at which we can deliver greater substance to the user, and where the culture is starting to crave exactly this kind of service as a way of making the Web meaningful again.
I think that interest networks are a huge market opportunity for many startups thinking about what the future of the Web will be like, and I think that we’ll start to see the term used more and more widely. We may even start to see some attention from analysts -- Carla, Jeremiah, and others, are you listening?
Now, I obviously think that Twine is THE interest network of choice. After all we helped to define the category, and we’re using the Semantic Web to do it. There’s a lot of potential in our engine and our application, and the growing community of passionate users we’ve attracted.
Our 1.0 release really focuses on UE/usability, which was a huge goal for us based on user feedback from our private beta, which began in March of this year. I’ll do another post soon talking about what’s new in Twine. But our TOS (time on site) at 6 minutes/user (all time) and 12 minutes/user (over the last month) is something that the team here is most proud of – it tells us that Twine is sticky, and that “the dogs are eating the dog food.”
Now that anyone can join, it will be fun and gratifying to watch Twine grow.
Still, there is a lot more to come, and in 2009 our focus is going to shift back to extending our Semantic Web platform and turning on more of the next-generation intelligence that we’ve been building along the way. We’re going to take interest networking to a whole new level.
Stay tuned!
I've posted a link to a video of my best talk -- given at the GRID '08 Conference in Stockholm this summer. It's about the growth of collective intelligence and the Semantic Web, and the future and role the media. Read more and get the video here. Enjoy!
I've posted a new article in my public twine about how we are moving from the World Wide Web to the Web Wide World. It's about how the Web is spreading into the physical world, and what this means.
Video from my panel at DEMO Fall '08 on the Future of the Web is now available.
I moderated the panel, and our panelists were:
Howard Bloom, Author, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc.
Jon Udell, Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
Prabhakar Raghavan, PhD, Head of Research and Search Strategy, Yahoo! Inc.
The panel was excellent, with many DEMO attendees saying it was the best panel they had ever seen at DEMO.
Many new and revealing insights were provided by our excellent panelists. I was particularly interested in the different ways that Google and Yahoo describe what they are working on. They covered lots of new and interesting information about their thinking. Howard Bloom added fascinating comments about the big picture and John Udell helped to speak about Microsoft's longer-term views as well.
Enjoy!!!
I'm moderating a panel at the upcoming DEMOfall 2008 conference this year on Where the Web is Going.
I've assembled an all-star cast of panelists, including:
Howard Bloom, Author, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc.
Jon Udell, Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
Prabhakar Raghavan, PhD, Head of Research and Search Strategy, Yahoo! Inc.
You can read more about it here. I hope you can attend!
I'm hoping that the market caps of some big public companies go up or down by a few hundred million after this panel. Stock brokers will be standing by to take your orders! :^)
Great news. Twine is a finalist in the Industry Standard’s Innovation 100 Awards.
Twine / Radar Networks was chosen as a finalist in the community category.
There
will be one "winner" in each category depending on which companies
and products receive the most community votes in each category. You may
vote for one company/product in each category. Voting will close at
midnight Pacific Time on October 3, 2008.
As well as Twine, I am also enjoying Friendfeed. They are complementary services. Twine is about sharing and discovering information about your interests, and Friendfeed is about keeping up with your friends and what they are up to on the Web. If you want to track me on Friendfeed, you can follow me here.
I have made a screencast that teaches you how to get started using Twine, and explains most of the features, best-practices for using it, and where we are headed with the product. You can read more about it and discuss it with me here.
For anyone who is new to Twine, this will be really helpful. Once you see this you will understand what Twine is for and how you can start to benefit from it right away.
The high-quality version is here.
For those who prefer YouTube's lower-quality here is the first part. Note that YouTube requires that videos are less than 10 minutes but the whole screencast is about 30 minutes, so I had to break it into parts. Here is Part 1 of 4:
And here is the rest of it in YouTube format:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
I just posted an article on how bookmarking is evolving, in response to the discussion about "Who Bookmarks Anymore?" that I found on Techmeme. Del.icio.us was a start. Twine is taking it somewhere new. Read about it on my public twine, here.
(Brief excerpt from a new post on my Public Twine -- Go there to read the whole thing and comment on it with me and others...).
I have spent the last year really thinking about the future of the Web. But lately I have been thinking more about the future of the desktop. In particular, here are some questions I am thinking about and some answers I've come up so far.
This is a raw, first-draft of what I think it will be like.
Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?
No. We've already seen several attempts at doing that -- and they never catch on. People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC.
Partly this is due to the difference in user experience between using real live folders, windows and menus on a local machine and doing that in "simulated" fashion via some Flash-based or HTML-based imitation of a desktop.
Web desktops to-date have simply have been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it.
Whoever does succeed in nailing this opportunity will have a real shot at becoming a very important player in the next-generation of the Web, Web 3.0.
From the points above it should be clear that I think the future of the desktop is going to be significantly different from what our desktops are like today.
It's going to be a hosted web service
Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there is going to be some kind of interface that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but it will become unified across devices.
Currently we have different spaces on different devices (laptop, mobile device, PC). These will merge. In order for that to happen they will ultimately have to be provided as a service via the Web. Local clients may be created for various devices, but ultimately the most logical choice is to just use the browser as the client.
Our desktop will not come from any local device and will always be available to us on all our devices.
The skin of your desktop will probably appear within your local device's browser as a completely dynamically hosted web application coming from a remote server. It will load like a Web page, on-demand from a URL.
This new desktop will provide an interface both to your local device, applications and information, as well as to your online life and information.
Instead of the browser running inside, or being launched from, some kind of next-generation desktop web interface technology, it's will be the other way around: The browser will be the shell and the desktop application will run within it either as a browser add-in, or as a web-based application.
The Web 3.0 desktop is going to be completely merged with the Web -- it is going to be part of the Web. There will be no distinction between the desktop and the Web anymore.
Today we think of our Web browser running inside our desktop as an applicaiton. But actually it will be the other way around in the future: Our desktop will run inside our browser as an application.
The focus shifts from information to attention
As our digital lives shift from being focused on the old fashioned desktop (space-based metaphor) to the Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (river of news, feeds, blogs, lifestreaming, microblogging).
Instead of being a big directory, the desktop of the future is going to be more like a Feed reader or social news site. The focus will be on keep up with all the stuff flowing through and what the trends are, rather than on all the stuff that is stored there already.
The focus will be on helping the user to manage their attention rather than just their information.
This is a leap to the meta-level. A second-order desktop. Instead of just being about the information (the first-order), it is going to be about what is happening with the information (the second-order).
It's going to shift us from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.
Our digital roles are already shifting from effectively acting as "librarians" to becoming more like "daytraders." We are all focusing more on keep up with change than on organizing information today. This will continue to eat up more of our attention...
Read the rest of this on my public Twine! http://www.twine.com/item/11bshgkbr-1k5/the-future-of-the-desktop
Twine is starting to gradually open up.
Today we quietly made all the public content in Twine visible to the public and search engines. We're not doing a big announcement about this. We plan to do that in the fall when we launch some important new features.
But the good news is that now that our content is visible, you can read my twine in your browser even if you are not yet a member, and you can subscribe to my twine by RSS -- just use the RSS link from here: http://www.twine.com/twine/1p2dqhdx-1jg/nova-spivack-my-public-twine.
I also invite you to join my twine, so we can have discussions and share things we think are interesting.
See you on Twine!
I love how my friend, Jason Calacanis, announces the death of blogging and his retirement from blogging...on a blog. He's a genius. You can read more here and here.
But as anyone who reads this blog knows, I try to be ahead of the curve. In keeping with that, I announced something similar last week. Sorry Jason, I beat you to it.
Unlike Jason, however, I haven't left blogging. Instead, my blogging has evolved and is moving into a better medium. Jason wants to go back to old fashioned email mailing lists, but I'm moving forward into something even better than blogs.
Blogs will continue of course, but for those of us who do a lot of blogging and online bookmarking, social networking, online discussions, and social media sharing -- blogs just aren't productive enough anymore. Neither are social networks or the other tools available today. Because of that, I believe that an increasing amount of activity is going to move off of today's blogs and into a new kind of social media environment. I call these next generation services, interest networks, and my company is building one of the first: Twine.
Interest networking is, I believe, the next evolution of social media. The next step after blogs, aggregators, personal home pages, and social networks. It brings them all together into a new synthesis that is finally what we all really were trying to achieve with all those separate tools in the first place. Interest networks are a big step towards a more unified, productive, and manageable social media environment.
I still blog here from time to time, but it's just a fraction of the online authoring and conversations I participate in now -- instead, the vast majority of my social media activity is taking place in Twine. I'm Twining a lot more than I'm blogging or participating in social networking -- probably by a factor of 100X.
Why have I been doing so much more Twining than blogging and social networking? First of all, I'm not interested in having a conversation with the entire general public, or ever being an A-List blogger, or interacting with networks of random strangers. What I want is to efficiently participate in many different specific groups and communities around particular interests and relationships I have.
Some of my interest communities are relevant to each other but many are not, and it would not make sense to combine them all into one blog or network (which is what present-day blogs and social networks require). In Twine it's super easy to create the equivalent of microblogs, microcommunities, and micronetworks, or to join and participate in, existing ones started by others, around any person, group or interest.
Some of my interest communities are public and many are private (for teams, for private discussions, etc). But I don't want to have to run many blogs or networks for all these different communities I want to converse with -- that's just too much work. Instead, in Twine it is extremely easy to do everything I need to do in one place.
In Twine I can create, join and converse with a large number of different individuals, groups and communities around particular interests, goals, activities and relationships I have. Many of my Twine interactions are public but some are private. They are not all structured or governed in the same way. Twine helps me manage them all, and participate efficiently to author content, track what others are saying, as well as to share and distribute my ideas, participate in discussions, and discover new things around my interests. That's what Twine was built to for.
Twine enables me to connect with others around my interests, the way I really want to. It's easier and smarter than blogging or other forms of social media. Of course, it's still a work in progress; we're still in beta and it's not perfect or even fully built yet. But it's getting there.
Twine has been making great headway in inventing and defining what interest networks should be like. Soon we are going to start opening Twine up to the wider Web. Very soon in fact. And then, as we move into the fall and winter release timeframes, we are going to be rolling out some important new capablities that may be very disruptive. Stay tuned. There are going to be a series of cool things happening in Twine during the remainder of this summer, and this year.
I agree with Jason -- blogging isn't good enough. The first wave of social media is ending -- for some because they couldn't cope with the overload, for others because they want a better medium. I believe interest networks are what's next and I hope to make Twine into the best place to network around interests on the Web. So don't give up blogging or move to email lists, Jason. Just move to a better platform. See you in Twine!
By the way, you can respond to this post in Twine, here. (I'm turning off comments on all new articles in this blog. If you want to have a real discussion with me and others, it's easier in Twine, so my discussions will be there from now on.)
And please join the FriendFeed room about Twine if you are there too.
This is a note to readers of this blog. As many of you know, I'm the CEO of Radar Networks, the makers of a new service called Twine.
Twine is a service for "interest networking," which I believe is the next evolution of social media.
How are social networks and interest networks different?
I now use Twine as my main place for authoring and sharing content on the Web. (I also use Twine as my main place for keeping up with my many interests. The Twine community does a great job of scouring the Web to find the content that I want to know about. Generally if there is an article that matters to me, it shows up in Twine very quickly. I no longer have to read as many RSS feeds. This is the power of collective intelligence at its best.)
However, although Twine can be used both to author and discover content around interest, in this article I will focus on the authoring side of the story.
Of course I am biased, but speaking from the perspective of a blogger, I can say that Twine is rapidly becoming the personal publishing environment I always dreamed of having. It's an ideal environment to author content and distribute it to highly relevant audiences.
In Twine, I have many different public and private microblogs on various topics that matter to me, and I also participate in microblogs that others have created. It's super easy to post to one or many of them at once.
Twine also has good support for discussions. It's very easy to have discussions around any piece of content -- and the discussions simply work better than they do in my Typepad blog. And of course, Twine has cool features such as automatic semantic tagging of all my posts, great content management features for finding all the content I have added, and powerful contextual recommendations to other interesting content that are added to my content.
As a result of these benefits, in the last month, I have found that my blogging activity in Twine has become about 100X my blogging activity here in Typepad (no offense to Typepad, by the way -- I really like Typepad too, but as a means of distributing content, it just isn't as useful to me as Twine).
Posting in a traditional blog is a labor intensive process and in the end my post only appears to the readers of one blog. But in Twine it is as easy as bookmarking something, or authoring a note, and then sharing it across a bunch of different communities. And Twine helps me keep track of the discussion around each of my posts as it evolves.
So if you are interested in what I'm reading, what I'm thinking about, and what matters to me, you'll find a lot more of that in Twine.
If you are not yet a Twine member already, register and you will be let in very quickly.
Here is where I hang out in Twine:
And if you want to track all my public posts in Twine, go to my profile and subscribe to my RSS feed in Twine.
Twine is still in invite only beta -- but in the second half of July we will be opening up all the public content in Twine to the open Web. Anyone will be able to read it and we will be letting people in faster as well.
I will still blog here when I have larger articles to share. But on a day-to-day basis, I will be posting a lot more in Twine. Hope to see you there!
(By the way, if you are a member of Twine and you are also finding that Twine is becoming the center of your social media life, feel free to copy and paste this post and adapt it into your own blog)
Tim Berners-Lee is giving a talk, and then we're on a panel, live, today, discussing the Semantic Web, Net Neturality and Web Science. Watch the live Webcast and submit your questions to the panel interactively. Details and times are here.
Melissa Pierce is a filmmaker who is making a film about "Life in Perpetual Beta." It's about how people who are adapting and reinventing themselves in the moment, and a new philosophy or approach to life. She's interviewed a number of interesting people, and while I was in Chicago recently, she spoke with me as well. Here is a clip about how I view the philosophy of living in Beta. Her film is also in perpetual beta, and you can see the clips from her interviews on her blog as the film evolves. Eventually it will be released through the indie film circuit, and it looks like it will be a cool film. By the way, she is open to getting sponsors so if you like this idea and want your brand on the opening credits, drop her a line!
I have been thinking about the situation in the Middle East and also the rise of oil prices, peak oil, and the problem of a world economy based on energy scarcity rather than abundance. There is, I believe, a way to solve the problems in the Middle East, and the energy problems facing the world, at the same time. But it requires thinking "outside the box."
Middle Eastern nations must take the lead in freeing the world from dependence on their oil. This is not only their best strategy for the future of their nations and their people, but also it is what will ultimately be best for the region and the whole world.
It is inevitable that someone is going to invent a new technology that frees the world from dependence on fossil fuels. When that happens all oil empires will suddenly collapse. Far-sighted, visionary leaders in oil-producing nations must ensure that their nations are in position to lead the coming non-fossil-fuel energy revolution. This is the wisdom of "cannibalize yourself before someone else does."
Middle Eastern nations should invest more heavily than any other nations in inventing and supplying new alternative energy technologies. For example: hydrogen, solar, biofuels, zero point energy, magnetic power, and the many new emerging alternatives to fossil fuels. This is a huge opportunity for the Middle East not only for economic reasons, but also because it may just be the key to bringing about long-term sustainable peace in the region.
There is a finite supply of oil in the Middle East -- the game will and must eventually end. Are Middle Eastern nations thinking far enough ahead about this or not? There is a tremendous opportunity for them if they can take the initiative on this front and there is an equally tremendous risk if they do not. If they do not have a major stake in whatever comes after fossil fuels, they will be left with nothing when whatever is next inevitably happens (which might be very soon).
Any Middle Eastern leader who is not thinking very seriously about this issue right now is selling their people short. I sincerely advise them to make this a major focus going forward. Not only will this help them to improve quality of life for their people now and in the future, but it is the best way to help bring about world peace. The Middle East has the potential to lead a huge and lucrative global energy Renaissance. All it takes is vision and courage to push the frontier and to think outside of the box.
Continue reading "Peace in the Middle East: Could Alternative Energy Be the Solution?" »
Here is the full video of my talk on the Semantic Web at The Next Web 2008 Conference. Thanks to Boris and the NextWeb gang!
For decades the world has struggled with what to do about unexploded land mines and cluster bombs killing innocent civilians, even years after a conflict has ended. The problem is that a significant percentage (10% - 40% in the case of cluster bombs) of these weapons do not explode when they are deployed, and instead blow up later on when they are disturbed by a person or animal. They also result in creating dead-zones that cannot be used for other purposes after a conflict because of the risk of unexploded ordinance.
Various treaties and proposals have been floated to ban these weapons, but they are not going to go away that easily. First of all, leading nations such as the USA, Russia and China (which also lead the production and sale of these weapons), refuse to participate in these treaties, and secondly, even if they do these weapons will still probably be used by outlaw nations.
While trying to get everyone to agree not to use these weapons is a noble goal, it is not very realistic. The genie is already out of the bottle. Putting it back in is very hard.
Instead, there is a more practical solution to this problem: Timed Deactivation. The basic idea is to redesign these weapons systems such that they simply cannot explode after a set period of time unless they are manually reset. A simple way to achieve this is to design them such that a crucial part of the weapon corrodes with exposure to naturally present environmental air or water over time. Or alternatively there can be a mechanical switch or even a battery powered timer. In either case, after a set period of time (1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, for example) the device simply decays and can no longer explode without a replacement part. In the best case, after an even longer period of time the explosives in the device should decay and be unusable, even with a replacement part.
Designing these weapons to self-destruct safely is a practical measure that should be part of the solution. Nations that refuse to agree not to use such weapons should at least be able to commit to designing them to deactivate automatically in this manner.
John Mills, one of the engineers behind Twine, recently wrote up an interesting article discussing our approach to semantic tags. It's a good read for folks who think about the Semantic Web and tags.
Continue reading "Tagging and the Semantic Web: Tags as Objects" »
A new study has found that using a cell phone 2 or 3 times a day while pregnant is potentially harmful to future child development. The risk level is on par with that of alchohol and tobacco.
Scientists found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent more likely to have children with behavioural problems and that the likelihood increased with the amount of potential exposure to the radiation
Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research.
A giant study, which surveyed more than 13,000 children, found that using the handsets just two or three times a day was enough to raise the risk of their babies developing hyperactivity and difficulties with conduct, emotions and relationships by the time they reached school age. And it adds that the likelihood is even greater if the children themselves used the phones before the age of seven.
The results of the study, the first of its kind, have taken the top scientists who conducted it by surprise. But they follow warnings against both pregnant women and children using mobiles by the official Russian radiation watchdog body, which believes that the peril they pose "is not much lower than the risk to children's health from tobacco or alcohol".
The research – at the universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Aarhus, Denmark – is to be published in the July issue of the journal Epidemiology and will carry particular weight because one of its authors has been sceptical that mobile phones pose a risk to health.
I have been thinking a lot about social networks lately, and why there are so many of them, and what will happen in that space.
Today I had what I think is a "big realization" about this.
Everyone, including myself, seems to think that there is only room for one big social network, and it looks like Facebook is winning that race. But what if that assumption is simply wrong from the start?
What if social networks are more like automobile brands? In other words, there can, will and should be many competing brands in the space?
Social networks no longer compete on terms of who has what members. All my friends are in pretty much every major social network.
I also don't need more than one social network, for the same reason -- my friends are all in all of them. How many different ways do I need to reach the same set of people? I only need one.
But the Big Realization is that no social network satisfies all types of users. Some people are more at home in a place like LinkedIn than they are in Facebook, for example. Others prefer MySpace. There are always going to be different social networks catering to the common types of people (different age groups, different personalities, different industries, different lifestyles, etc.).
The Big Realization implies that all the social networks are going to be able to interoperate eventually, just like almost all email clients and servers do today. Email didn't begin this way. There were different networks, different servers and different clients, and they didn't all speak to each other. To communicate with certain people you had to use a certain email network, and/or a certain email program. Today almost all email systems interoperate directly or at least indirectly. The same thing is going to happen in the social networking space.
Today we see the first signs of this interoperability emerging as social networks open their APIs and enable increasing integration. Currently there is a competition going on to see which "open" social network can get the most people and sites to use it. But this is an illusion. It doesn't matter who is dominant, there are always going to be alternative social networks, and the pressure to interoperate will grow until it happens. It is only a matter of time before they connect together.
I think this should be the greatest fear at companies like Facebook. For when it inevitably happens they will be on a level playing field competing for members with a lot of other companies large and small. Today Facebook and Google's scale are advantages, but in a world of interoperability they may actually be disadvantages -- they cannot adapt, change or innovate as fast as smaller, nimbler startups.
Thinking of social networks as if they were automotive brands also reveals interesting business opportunities. There are still several unowned opportunities in the space.
Myspace is like the car you have in high school. Probably not very expensive, probably used, probably a bit clunky. It's fine if you are a kid driving around your hometown.
Facebook is more like the car you have in college. It has a lot of your junk in it, it is probably still not cutting edge, but its cooler and more powerful.
LinkedIn kind of feels like a commuter car to me. It's just for business, not for pleasure or entertainment.
So who owns the "adult luxury sedan" category? Which one is the BMW of social networks?
Who owns the sportscar category? Which one is the Ferrari of social networks?
Who owns the entry-level commuter car category?
Who owns equivalent of the "family stationwagon or minivan" category?
Who owns the SUV and offroad category?
You see my point. There are a number of big segments that are not owned yet, and it is really unlikely that any one company can win them all.
If all social networks are converging on the same set of features, then eventually they will be close to equal in function. The only way to differentiate them will be in terms of the brands they build and the audience segments they focus on. These in turn will cause them to emphasize certain features more than others.
In the future the question for consumers will be "Which social network is most like me? Which social network is the place for me to base my online presence?"
Sue may connect to Bob who is in a different social network -- his account is hosted in a different social network. Sue will not be a member of Bob's service, and Bob will not be a member of Sue's, yet they will be able to form a social relationship and communication channel. This is like email. I may use Outlook and you may use Gmail, but we can still send messages to each other.
Although all social networks will interoperate eventually, depending on each person's unique identity they may choose to be based in -- to live and surf in -- a particular social network that expresses their identity, and caters to it. For example, I would probably want to be surfing in the luxury SUV of social networks at this point in my life, not in the luxury sedan, not the racecar, not in the family car, not the dune-buggy. Someone else might much prefer an open source, home-built social network account running on a server they host. It shouldn't matter -- we should still be able to connect, share stuff, get notified of each other's posts, etc. It should feel like we are in a unified social networking fabric, even though our accounts live in different services with different brands, different interfaces, and different features.
I think this is where social networks are heading. If it's true then there are still many big business opportunities in this space.
This is a brief post with one purpose: to clarify the meaning of the term "semantic." It has suddenly become chic to label every new app as somehow "semantic" but what does this mean really? Are all "semantic" apps part of the "Semantic Web?" What is the criteria for something to be "semantic" versus "Semantic Web" anyway?
It's pretty simple actually. Any app that can understand language to some degree could be labeled as "semantic." So even Google is somewhat of a semantic application by that criterion. Of course some applications are a lot more semantic than others. Powerset is more semantic than Google, for example, because it understands natural language, not just keywords.
But for an application to be considered part of the "Semantic Web" it has to support a set of open standards defined by the W3C, including at the very least RDF, and potentially also OWL and SPARQL. These are the technologies that collectively comprise the Semantic Web. Supporting these technologies means making at least some RDF data visible to outside applications.
I'm not sure if Powerset is doing this yet, nor whether Freebase is doing it yet, but they should (and I'm guessing they will). Twine, my company's application, is using RDF and OWL internally within our app and we are also exposing this via our site (although we are still in private beta so only beta participants can see that data today). Other companies such as Digg are already making their RDF data visible to the public. Any application with at least publishes RDF data can be considered to be both semantic and part of the Semantic Web.
Our present day search engines are a poor match for the way that our brains actually think and search for answers. Our brains search associatively along networks of relationships. We search for things that are related to things we know, and things that are related to those things. Our brains not only search along these networks, they sense when networks intersect, and that is how we find things. I call this associative search, because we search along networks of associations between things.
Human memory -- in other words, human search -- is associative. It works by "homing in" on what we are looking for, rather than finding exact matches. Compare this to the the keyword search that is so popular on the Web today and there are obvious differences. Keyword searching provides a very weak form of "homing in" -- by choosing our keywords carefully we can limit the set of things which match. But the problem is we can only find things which contain those literal keywords.
There is no actual use of associations in keyword search, it is just literal matching to keywords. Our brains on the other hand use a much more sophisticated form of "homing in" on answers. Instead of literal matches, our brains look for things things which are associatively connected to things we remember, in order to find what we are ultimately looking for.
For example, consider the case where you cannot remember someone's name. How do you remember it? Usually we start by trying to remember various facts about that person. By doing this our brains then start networking from those facts to other facts and finally to other memories that they intersect. Ultimately through this process of "free association" or "associative memory" we home in on things which eventually trigger a memory of the person's name.
Both forms of search make use of the intersections of sets, but the
associative search model is exponentially more powerful because for
every additional search term in your query, an entire network of
concepts, and relationships between them, is implied. One additional
term can result in an entire network of related queries, and when you
begin to intersect the different networks that result from multiple
terms in the query, you quickly home in on only those results that make
sense. In keyword search on the other hand, each additional search term
only provides a linear benefit -- there is no exponential amplification
using networks.
Keyword search is a very weak approximation of associative search because there really is no concept of a relationship at all. By entering keywords into a search engine like Google we are simulating an associative search, but without the real power of actual relationships between things to help us. Google does not know how various concepts are related and it doesn't take that into account when helping us find things. Instead, Google just looks for documents that contain exact matches to the terms we are looking for and weights them statistically. It makes some use of relationships between Web pages to rank the results, but it does not actually search along relationships to find new results.
Basically the problem today is that Google does not work the way our brains think. This difference creates an inefficiency for searchers: We have to do the work of translating our associative way of thinking into "keywordese" that is likely to return results we want. Often this requires a bit of trial and error and reiteration of our searches before we get result sets that match our needs.
A recently proposed solution to the problem of "keywordese" is natural language search (or NLP search), such as what is being proposed by companies like Powerset and Hakia. Natural language search engines are slightly closer to the way we actually think because they at least attempt to understand ordinary language instead of requiring keywords. You can ask a question and get answers to that question that make sense.
Natural language search engines are able to understand the language of a query and the language in the result documents in order to make a better match between the question and potential answers. But this is still not true associative search. Although these systems bear a closer resemblance to the way we think, they still do not actually leverage the power of networks -- they are still not as powerful as associative search.
This is a video of my talk at the Digital Now conference in Orlando yesterday. There's a long intro by Don Dea, and then I speak (starting at index 05:14) about the Semantic Web and Twine.
Give me a tip!
Recent Comments