Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here.
This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer [...]

Barney Pell invited me to a dinner tonight for the founders, funders, and friends of Singularity University tonight at the NASA Ames campus. I’ve been following the progress of the initiative for some time, via Peter Diamandis, who I’ve known since I attended the International Space University program in 1992. Singularity University brings together luminaries [...]

“All reality is virtual” — Terrence McKenna

This is Part II of my article “The Global Brain is About to Wake Up” — about the  realtime Web and how it relates to the emerging Global Brain.
Here I focus mainly on thorny philosophical and scientific speculations about the nature of consciousness, the role it plays in the [...]

The emerging realtime Web is not only going to speed up the Web and our lives, it is going to bring about a kind of awakening of our collective Global Brain. It’s going to change how many things happen on online, but it’s also going to change how we see and understand what the Web [...]

We are so focused on how to improve present-day search engines. But that is a kind of mental myopia. In fact, a more interesting and fruitful question is why do people search at all? What are they trying to accomplish? And is there a better way to help them accomplish that than search?
Instead of finding [...]

I’m testing out a new service that provides a way to make money via Twitter. It’s an insanely viral idea. And they seem to be implementing it tastefully. Quite impressed so far.
I’m going to test it out and see what happens. I invite you to test it out too. Click here.
What I like about the [...]

This is a series of screenshots that demo the latest build of the consumer experience and developer tools for Twine.com’s “T2″ semantic search product. This is still in internal alpha — not released to public yet.
Twine T2 Demo & Dev Tools (Screenshots Series)
View more presentations from Twine.com.

This is the story of Twine.com — our early research (with never before seen screenshots of our early semantic desktop work), and our evolution from Twine 1.0 towards Twine 2.0 (“T2″) which is focused on semantic search.
A Yarn About Twine — ISWC 2009 Keynote — Nova Spivack
View more presentations from Twine.com.

This is a talk I have given many times, on the past, present and future evolution of the Web, and particularly the Semantic Web.

Web Evolution Nova Spivack Twine
View more presentations from Twine.com.

I have noticed an interesting and important trend of late. The Web is starting to spread outside of what we think of as “the Web” and into “the World.” This trend is exemplified by many data points. For example:

The Web on mobile devices like the iPhone. Finally it’s really usable [...]

(FIRST DRAFT — A Work in Progress. Comments Welcome)
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Print media publications of all kinds — newspapers and magazines –are dying out, as the Web and online advertising take their place. Increasing amounts of what used to be premium content (via paid wire services and databases for example) is now available for free on the Web.
At [...]

My friend Gil Elbaz is launching Factual today. It's a new service that aims to aggregate spreadsheet style data from around the Web to create a vast open database of facts. Interesting stuff. Check it out. Here's the TechCrunch coverage.

The panel picker for SXSWi went live this morning, and Twine has propsed several submissions. Browsing through the huge list of proposals (over 2200), it’s clear that the Semantic Web will be popular topic at this year’s conference.
With “Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web,” we are planning to offer both an overview of the [...]

May 8, 2009
Welcome to The Stream
The Internet began evolving many decades before the Web emerged. And while today many people think of the Internet and the Web as one and the same, in fact they are different. The Web lives on top of the Internet’s infrastructure much like software and documents live on top of [...]

(DRAFT 2. A Work-In-Progress)
The Problem: Our Communities are Failing
I’ve been thinking about community lately. There is a great need for a new and better model for communities in the world today.
Our present communites are not working and most are breaking down or stagnating. Cities are experiencing urbanization and a host of ensuing  social and economic [...]

We’ve integrated Twine and Twitter so you can “tweet what you twine” — it’s surprisingly easy and cool. Try it!

I am worried about Twitter. I love it the way it is today. But it’s about to change big time, and I wonder whether it can survive the transition.
Twitter is still relatively small in terms of users, and most of the content is still being added by people. But not for long. Two things are [...]

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.

Notes:
- This article last updated on March 11, 2009.
- For follow-up, connect with me about this on Twitter here.
- See also: for more details, be sure to read the new review by Doug Lenat, creator of Cyc. He just saw the Wolfram Alpha demo and has added many useful insights.
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Introducing Wolfram Alpha
Stephen Wolfram is [...]

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 [...]

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:

In the 1980’s the fax machine made snailmail almost obsolete. Faxing was faster.
In the 1990’s email made faxing almost obsolete. Email was faster.
In the 2000’s [...]

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 [...]

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.

It is both real-time and asynchronous
You [...]

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.

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.

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 [...]

Kevin Kelly recently wrote another fascinating article about evidence of a global superorganism. It’s another useful contribution to the ongoing evolution of this meme.
I tend to agree that we are at what Kevin calls, Stage III. However, an important distinction in my own thinking is that the superorganism is not comprised just of machines, but [...]

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).

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 [...]