Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

Bottlenose (disclosure: my startup) just launched the first attention engine this week. But it appears that Bit.ly is launching one soon as well. It’s going to get interesting to watch this category develop. Clearly there is new interest in building a good real-time picture of what’s happening, and what’s trending, and providing search, discovery, and [...]

How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and Enable Smarter Collective Intelligence This article is part 4 in a series of articles about the Bottlenose Public Beta launch. Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter The Bottlenose Business Concept How Bottlenose Works – A Glimpse Under the Hood How Bottlenose [...]

How Bottlenose Works This article is the third article in a series of articles about the Bottlenose Public Beta launch. Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter The Bottlenose Business Concept How Bottlenose Works – A Glimpse Under the Hood (you are here) How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and [...]

Bottlenose – The Business Model This is part 2 of a series of articles about the Bottlenose Public Beta launch. Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter The Bottlenose Business Concept (you are here) How Bottlenose Works – A Glimpse Under the Hood How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and [...]

Recently, one of Twitter’s top search engineers tweeted that Twitter was set to “change search forever.” This proclamation sparked a hearty round of speculation and excitement about what was coming down the pipe for Twitter search. The actual announcement featured the introduction of autocomplete and the ability to search within the subset of people on [...]

I am writing this article because I love Twitter, and I’ve built a business around making sense of Twitter data. I am concerned by the recent “ominous” signs that Twitter may be heading down a path towards becoming a closed platform — a path that betrays the trust and goodwill given to them by millions [...]

Today I had an interesting phone call with an alumnus of my alma mater, Oberlin College. He called me for an informational interview, asking for some career advice. It was a good conversation. At one point, on a tangent, he asked me why I went to Oberlin? It’s a funny story actually. In fact, I [...]

Continuing with the theme I’ve been writing about lately, focused on the growth of the next phase of the Web, what I call “The Stream,” I’ve started to analyze the messages I get on a typical day. First of all, through all the different channels I use, I now receive approximately 13,000 messages a day. [...]

This is Part III of a series of articles on the new era of the Stream, a new phase of the Web. In Part I, The Message is the Medium, I explored the shift in focus on the Web from documents to messages. In Part II, Drowning in the Stream, we dove deep into some of [...]

This is Part II of a three-part series of articles on how the Stream is changing the Web. In Part I of this series, The Message is the Medium, I wrote about some of the shifts that are taking place as the center of online attention shifts from documents to messages. Here in Part II, [...]

Shift Happens A major shift has taken place on the Web. Web pages and Web search are no longer the center of online activity and attention. Instead, the new center of attention is messaging and streams. We have moved from the era of the Web to the era of the Stream. This changes everything. Back [...]

Consciousness is the most amazing of all things, but not everyone recognizes this fact. Fortunately, this can be changed. For some people the experience of being conscious is so vivid that it is literally striking, almost shocking to them at times. It is clearly apparent to them that consciousness is a totally unique and mysterious [...]

In the previous article in this series, Is The Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges I wrote about some new evidence that appears to suggest that the universe may be like a computer, or least that it contains computer codes of a sort. But while this evidence is fascinating, I don’t believe that ultimately the [...]

I haven’t posted in a while, but this is blog-worthy material. I’ve recently become familiar with the thinking of University of Maryland physicist, James Gates Jr. Dr. Gates is working on a branch of physics called supersymmetry. In the process of his work he’s discovered the presence of what appear to resemble a form of [...]

Today I’m happy to announce the launch of StreamGlider, a new tablet app (initially on iPad) that provides the first live streaming dashboard for keeping up with your interests. TechCrunch just broke the story. The inspiration for StreamGlider was a product that launched in the early 1990′s called Pointcast. Pointcast streamed news, entertainment, ads and [...]

After my former project, Twine.com, was sold, I began to turn my attention to the Next Big Challenge: How to make sense of the growing real-time Web, or what many call, “the Stream.” I could see the writing on the wall, and it was less than 140 characters: Social media’s own success was going to [...]

Today, after almost two years of work in stealth, I am proud to announce the launch of Bottlenose. While I have co-founded and serve on the boards of several other ventures (The Daily Dot, Live Matrix, StreamGlider, and others), Bottlenose is different from all my other projects in that I am also in a full-time [...]

Today I’m pleased to announce that, The Daily Dot, our newest “venture production,” has launched into public beta. The Daily Dot is the first of its kind – it’s the Web’s newspaper — the first community newspaper about the Web. We cover the Web like a town paper covers its community. Here’s a video overview [...]

The social media landscape is changing quickly, but this change won’t be immediate, or for that matter, efficient. And that’s going to be a big problem for all of us. I believe that Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn are fundamentally different, and thus, should not be in competition. However, I’m not sure the companies themselves [...]

It may look like Google+ is competing with Facebook and Twitter, but I don’t think that is what will happen in the end. I think Google+ is a very different kind of service and it’s not clear that it can or will, or should, replace these other services. In a series of articles here on [...]

In previous articles, I’ve written about how Google+ can build a developer ecosystem on Chrome that is different from Twitter’s ecosystem, and how Twitter must change to survive against that. It’s clear that Google+ and Twitter are very different animals. Now what about Facebook? Should Facebook be worried about Google+? Are Facebook and Google+ really [...]

As a result of the emergence of Google+, Twitter could soon find itself in a tough spot. A large chunk of their core developer base might migrate to Google+ because there is simply more opportunity there. Why? Well for starters, it’s really easy to crank out Chrome extensions and you can market and sell them [...]

Google+ has seen some good initial uptake from early-adopters in its first few weeks. But how will it leverage developers and partners? In order to really build value around Google+, of course Google will integrate it with their other products, including Search, Gmail, and more. That will get it in front of a lot of [...]

I was recently interviewed by Stephen Ibaraki and Alex Lin (CEO of ChinaValue) in what turned out to be the most interesting, far-reaching, and multi-disciplinary (and long) interview I’ve ever given. I was very pleased with the depth of their questions and the topics we covered. You can listen to the MP3 version here, or [...]

TechCrunch kindly ran my most recent article today — the full version is available here. Here is an excerpt: I’ve been puzzling over Twitter’s recent tactical moves around their API, Ubermedia and Tweetdeck, for a few months now, and it just doesn’t add up. In fact I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in [...]

I’m pleased to announce that my newest venture production is beginning to unstealth. It’s called The Daily Dot and it promises to be “the hometown newspaper of the Web ” — the community newspaper for Web. The story of The Daily Dot began several years ago when I was thinking about where the Web was [...]

I’m writing this post since many of my friends and colleagues have gotten wind of some news and asked me what I’m up to. This is just the first in a series of articles I’ll be writing on this topic. In a nutshell, I’ve been working behind the scenes for the last year to co-found [...]

My father, Mayer Spivack, passed away on February 12, 2011, in the Kaplan Family House, a beautiful hospice outside of Boston. He passed away, at the young age of 74, after a difficult year and a half battle with colon cancer. During his illness he never lost his spirit of childlike curiosity, enormous compassion, and [...]

Tonight I am pleased to announce that my next Big Idea has launched. It’s called Live Matrix and I invite you to come check it out. Live Matrix is the schedule of the Web — We help you to find out “What’s When on the Web” — the hottest live online events happening on the [...]

If 2010 was the year of the Real-Time Web, then 2011 is going to be the year that it evolves into the Scheduled Web. The Real-Time Web happens in the now: it is spontaneous, overwhelming, and disorganized. Things just happen unpredictably and nobody really knows what to expect or what will happen when. The Real-Time [...]