Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses on ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
Last week Twitter announced changes to their APIs. These changes impose severe limitations on the use of Twitter’s APIs by third-party apps and sites. But beyond just the new limitations, there was a bigger problem with the announcement: Vagueness. The announcement was actually quite vague in many key areas. It left many questions unanswered and [...]
One thing I find quite ironic about the whole Twitter API crackdown is when people try to rationalize it because “Twitter needs to be a multibillion dollar business” or “Twitter must remain an independent company” etc. These kinds of statements just don’t hold water. Twitter CAN in fact make more money, and be more independent, by opening [...]
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 [...]
Joshua Schachter, the creator of Delicious, has launched his newest creation, Jig. At first glance the site seems a bit like Twitter, but it has a different focus. Instead of posting about what you are doing, you post about what you need. Then other people reply with suggestions, ideas, answers, help, or presumably commercial products [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Kate Ray has done a terrific job illustrating and explaining Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web in her new documentary. She interviews, Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, me, and many others. If you’re interested in where the Web is headed, and the challenges and opportunities ahead, then you should watch this, and share it too!
I have started blogging about a new concept that I call The Scheduled Web. The Scheduled Web is the next evolution of the Real-Time Web, in which it will become possible to actually navigate the time dimension of the Web more productively. There is a popular misconception that on-demand content, such as archived video, is [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
Sneak Preview of Siri – The Virtual Assistant that will Make Everyone Love the iPhone, Part 2: The Technical Stuff In Part-One of this article on TechCrunch, I covered the emerging paradigm of Virtual Assistants and explored a first look at a new product in this category called Siri. In this article, Part-Two, I interview [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]