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 other updates to screensavers. Pointcast was great, and we, (myself and my co-founders, Bill McDaniel and John Breslin) wondered whether we could evolve that concept and update it for the tablet and mobile era.

We designed StreamGlider to be the ultimate live streaming newsreader. It does what you have come to expect, plus a lot more. And it does it live – it streams live updates to your tablet.

It also offers a lot of new functionality that supports new ways of using a reader.

• StreamGlider pulls live updates from content sources on the Web (RSS feeds, Google Reader, and Web API’s like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc.) onto mobile devices, and displays them in a variety of formats.
• It can function as a live digital picture frame for the Web, showing news articles, photos from friends, videos, etc. as full-screen slides that scroll past.
• It can also show streams as a live interactive filmstrips that function like tickers.
• And it can show streams in an interactive magazine format that is similar to a newspaper layout.
• You can also play and watch videos in StreamGlider.

Powerful Features

StreamGlider is fully gesture controlled – everything can be controlled by swiping, pinching, pointing, tapping, etc. You can easily customize the streams you want.

You can also create mashups of streams that pull from many different sources on a theme – for example you can pull from different news sources about sports, or different photo and video sources about a topic.

In addition to all this, you can make very personalized streams that pull from your social media accounts, and filtered streams that search for particular topics in content sources.

StreamGlider is also social. You can share individual items, or even entire streams of items, with your friends.

We designed StreamGlider to be brandable. Partners and customers can create their own private-labelled versions of StreamGlider, with their brand and their content, for their audiences. Brands can sell it or give it away free and run ads in it if they want. (Contact StreamGlider, if you’re interested in doing this for your brand).

This frees publishers, brands, and enterprises to create their own powerful readers for their audiences, with their brand, instead of having to live inside of other apps like FlipBoard or Pulse. They can have their own icon on the desktop and keep their direct relationship with their customers.

There are many use-cases for this – for example, you might want to distribute your own branded StreamGlider for your publication, or for a consumer product, or to your fans, or for a big event, or to your customers or employees. There are many reasons to do this – and you don’t have to be a software company to do it – you can almost instantly get your own branded StreamGlider.

We also designed StreamGlider to be open-source in the future. More news on that later. We hope we can become the Mozilla of newsreaders.

What’s next?

The team behind StreamGlider has a long history of making smart, semantic apps. You can expect that in future versions of StreamGlider, the app will begin to get smarter, more personalized, and even more social. This is just the beginning of our roadmap.

We will also be adding in support for more types of streams. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, you should check it out. Download it to your iPad and see what I’m talking about.

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 be its biggest challenge. The Stream was going to soon become unusable.

In the early days of the Stream, it was actually possible to keep up with your community on Twitter and Facebook effectively. Not anymore. There are just too many people messaging too often. The chances of even seeing a message before it scrolls into history are getting lower every day.

Today, the Stream is growing exponentially. Twitter famously grew by 3x in the last year and sends out more than 250 million Tweets per day. Facebook sends billions of public and private messages per day. And this is just the tip of the iceberg — or the deluge, as it were.

There are so many new and growing sources of messages in the Stream: Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Youtube, RSS feeds, and more are coming. And that’s just the consumer side of the Stream – there’s a whole other side to the Stream: Chatter, Yammer, Socialcast, Jive, and many other enterprise streams are also growing rapidly.

And on top of this there is a whole new deluge of machine and app-generated data that is just starting to join the stream, and may eventually dwarf human-generated data.

At the same time as all these new networks are popping up to enable messaging in the Stream, the barrier to creating and sharing messages has also never been lower. I call this The Sharepocalypse.

It’s never been easier to share — People are sharing more kinds of information, more often, with more people, than ever before. And it’s requiring less thought too — because the messages themselves are so short. This is resulting in a collective overshare of unimagined proportions.

With email, the messages were usually long and required some effort, so people sent relatively few emails per day. And at least with email there were some basic social rules about what you could send to everyone without being a spammer.

Not anymore. In the age of the Stream it’s quite normal to post out what you had for lunch, or some cool product you are looking at in a store window, with a photo, to the entire world. That would have been unthinkable in the email era. In the age of the Stream, it’s not even an afterthought. The Sharepocalypse is here, in spades.

The result of all this adoption and growth of the Stream is a new kind of information overload, stream overload.

Stream Overload is worse than email overload, because it includes email overload.

Email, in my opinion was “Stream 1.0.” Social media (RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) were “Stream 2.0.” And now we’re entering “Stream 3.0″ – when everything – all information, all applications, everyone, even things – become part of the Stream.

(Yes I know, version numbers are so Web 3.0, but it’s helpful to use them as handles for the discussion. Stream 3.0 is indeed a different era from the early days of the Stream.)

We’re already seeing the signs of stream overload — but this is just a preview of what’s to come as Stream 3.0 comes to maturity. The growth of the Stream is still only just beginning. Most of the planet isn’t using it yet. And most people don’t realize how integral it’s going to be in their lives in coming years.

If the Web is the planet’s brain, the Stream is its mind – it’s the living, breathing, thinking, learning, aware, acting part. And we’re all going to be part of it 24/7, whether we like it or not. So it better be good, it better be smart, it better be useable, or we’re all going to be gridlocked and buried in messages we don’t want.

And this is the Next Big Problem: The Stream is going to become both more important, and more noisy at the same time. This is a classic crisis. Either something must be done to reduce the noise, or it’s not going to be useable. And this will lead to problems, because it’s important that it actually is usable.

What happens if the Stream really breaks down under its own weight?

If the signal-to-noise problem isn’t solved, and people can’t keep up with the Stream, they’re going to give up. They’re going to stop paying attention. They’re going to stop trying to keep up. They will never be able to scroll down enough. They won’t even login to sites like Twitter and Facebook if they are too overloaded.

And if nobody is there listening, then there won’t be much point in posting news and updates to the Stream either. People will stop posting too.

And without the people there, marketers won’t post either – so the advertising money will go away. And even in the social enterprise, if streams for teams get too noisy, they will also stop being used and people will move to some new solution.

And without the people there, the Stream will become an automaton. All that will be left is machines posting to machines.

Unless something is done to solve it, of course.

And something IS being done, it turns out. We’re launching Bottlenose tonight. To read more about the history of the project, read Bottlenose has Launched!

Notes

Make sure to follow us on Twitter:

• @bottlenoseapp – the official Bottlenose Twitter account
• @novaspivack — yours truly
• @dominiek — Dominiek ter Heide, Bottlenose CTO

And come check out Bottlenose! The app is still in invite beta so you either have to have a high enough Klout score or an invite code to get in.

The first 500 readers of my blog who want to try it out, can get into Bottlenose using the invite code: novafriends

Check out the what the press is saying about Bottlenose:

Bottlenose Intelligent Social Dashboard Launches Private Beta  — ReadWriteWeb

Bottlenose is a Game Changer for Social Media Consumption — Mashable

Bottlenose is a Social Media Dashboard That Makes Sense of the Stream – Venturebeat

Can This Startup Eliminate Social Media Overload? — Inc.

The Day of the Dolphin: Swim in the Personalized Stream With Bottlenose — SemanticWeb

Bottlenose Launch – A Smarter Way to Skim the Stream – SiliconAngle

Bottlenose is a Web-Based Twitter Client for Power Users — AllThingsD

Managing the Sharepocalypse — AdWeek

Can Bottlenose Help Prevent the Social Sharepocalypse? – GigaOm

Social Overload? Bottlenose Promises Intelligent Filtering — Information Week

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 day-to-day role as the CEO. In short, Bottlenose is what I’m putting the bulk of my time into going forward, although I will continue to angel invest and advise other startups.

The story of Bottlenose began when my good friend and advisor, Josh Jones-Dilworth, introduced me to Dominiek ter Heide after I sold my last company, Twine.com in 2010.

Dominiek was at the time working on a new kind of personalization technology for social media. Meanwhile, I had been thinking about how to filter the Stream, and the emerging problem of the Sharepocalypse and what I have been calling “the Stream 3.0 Problem.”

Josh knew both of us and had a hunch that we were really thinking about the same problem from different angles. Dominiek and I started speaking via Skype and soon we teamed up. Bottlenose was officially born in 2010.

Working with Dominiek has been a true pleasure. He’s one of the most productive, talented, software engineers I’ve ever met. It’s been an amazing ride so far. Soon, thanks to Dominiek, we were joined by an A-team of killer engineers with expertise in natural language processing, Node.js, Javascript, HTML 5, machine learning, cloud computing, NoSQL, and more.

Our little band of hotshots has produced an amazingly robust and powerful app — something that even large companies with huge engineering teams would be hard-pressed to develop. I’m honored to be working with these guys, and very proud of the team and the what we’ve built.

We have also been fortunate to be joined by some terrific angel investors, including Andy Jenks, of Stage One Capital, and several others (see the About page on Bottlenose for the complete list).

So what is Bottlenose anyway? Well one way to find out is to visit the site and check out the Tour there. But I’ll summarize here as well:

Bottlenose is the smartest social media dashboard ever built. It’s designed for busy people who make heavy use of social media: prosumers, influencers, professionals.

Bottlenose uses next-generation “stream intelligence” technology to understand the messages that are flowing through Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. It also learns about your interests.

On the basis of this knowledge, Bottlenose helps you filter your streams to find what matters to you, what’s relevant, and what’s most important. Bottlenose also includes many new features, like Sonar, which visualizes what’s going on in any stream, and powerful rules and automation capabilities to help you become more productive.

This is just the beginning of this adventure. Our roadmap for Bottlenose is very ambitious, and it’s going to be a lot of fun, and hopefully will really make a difference too. We’re super excited about this product and we hope you will be as well.

Check back here for more posts and observations about Bottlenose and where I think social media is headed.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter:

• @bottlenoseapp – the official Bottlenose Twitter account
• @novaspivack — yours truly
• @dominiek — Dominiek ter Heide, Bottlenose CTO

And come check out Bottlenose! The app is still in invite beta so you either have to have a high enough Klout score or an invite code to get in.

The first 500 readers of my blog who want to try it out, can get into Bottlenose using the invite code: novafriends

I look forward to seeing you Bottlenose!

For more about the thinking behind Bottlenose, read The Problem of Stream 3.0

Several years ago my friend Gil Elbaz (CEO of Factual; forefather of Google AdWords) approached me with an ambitious vision – he wanted to create an open not-for-profit crawl of the Web to ensure that everyone would have equal access to a Web-scale search index to build on and experiment with.

Search giants like Google and Microsoft were not likely to provide open access to their search indices because they couldn’t risk giving their crown jewels to potential competitors, and furthermore they were bound by the constraints of for-profit business models.

Gil felt that in the future it would be an important service to provide a truly open Web-scale search index that was not controlled by a for-profit company and was not bound by profit motives. This index would make it possible for startups to innovate in search, and for researchers and students to explore Web Science at scale, and furthermore it would level the playing field in search and distribute the index, preventing any one company from monopolizing the index of humanity’s knowledge.

As a longtime advocate of the open Web, I was excited by the vision Gil shared with me, and agreed to join the board of directors of what became The Common Crawl Foundation, along with Carl Malamud. Gil and lead engineer, Ahad Rana, then went to work actually building the thing. This was no small undertaking and required quite a bit of innovation and ingenuity. You can read about the cloud based solution that was developed here.

Several years later, after a lot of work, it’s starting to be ready for Prime Time, and so we’re happy to announce the Web’s first truly open, non-profit, 5 billion page search index!

With the recent addition of our director, Lisa Green, from Creative Commons, Common Crawl is now beginning a new phase in its rollout, and a new phase for the open Web. You can read our inaugural blog post announcing the project here.

We hope you will come in and take a look around, and we look forward to seeing what you dream up and build with this data set.

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 and services that can meet your need.

This is not a new idea. It’s been done before, at least in print, quite successfully, in the form of “the want ads.” Want ads are classified ads, where instead of offering something, you ask for something. They are basically inverse classified ads. Like a reverse auction is an inverse auction.

But although it’s not groundbreakingly new, it’s beautifully executed and quite simple and elegant. It’s elegant enough in fact that it might catch on. And if it does, it could be quite useful.

The site has some similarities to Quora, but it’s broader. It’s not just about questions and answers – it’s about getting help with any kind of need.

Looking through the initial needs being posted by early users there are requests for restaurants suggestions, a guy asking what gift he should buy for his minimalist girlfriend, a request to understand how UFO propulsion works, requests to hire people, and even a request for affordable health insurance.

There also seems to be quite a bit of spam, or at least unhelpful questions and comments, including some harmless but irrelevant banter. Jig will need to provide for a way to rank needs, comments, and authors so that noise is filtered out. This is a problem that Schachter should be able to solve in his sleep, so I’m not worried about that being a barrier to adoption. It will be resolved soon, I’m betting.

There’s a lot of potential here, if people actively start helping to share their tips and advice for getting needs met. One challenge will be to make it easy for people to find needs they can help with. A categorization system, based on hashtags perhaps, would help to find needs that match your offers or areas of expertise.

All the product level issues are pretty easy to solve. This is not rocket science. But a harder problem to solve is, how is Jig going to make money? Who is going to have to pay for what? There’s always a catch somewhere. At least if the goal is to build a revenue business.

Will users eventually be charged to post certain kinds of needs? Or is the idea to charge companies, for example, as they are asked to do when posting job ads in Craigslist? Or will there be some kind of reverse auction or group buying angle to this – when enough people have the same need they can pool together and negotiate for a group deal?

Time will tell. But since it’s Joshua Schachter, Jig is bound to get a lot of attention. Check it out for yourself and see if it meets your needs.

By the way, if you’re reading this, tell our reporters at The Daily Dot (@dailydot) what you think of Jig, and whether it’s helped you in any interesting ways. We’re curious to hear your perspective.

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 of the site.

This venture began with the insight that each of us is spending an increasing amount of our lives online, in various online communities, yet we have very little insight into what’s going in this new landscape. These communities are literally places, and some of them are quite large. This is beautifully illustrated in this “map” of the Web as a geography.

I believe that it’s time for the Web community to have it’s own newspaper. The launch of the Daily Dot — the web community’s first actual newspaper of record — is a turning point, a coming-of-age, for the Web as a medium, as a place, and as a community.

Our editorial focus is different than other publications that cover the Web. Instead of covering the Web as an industry, a technology or a phenomenon, we cover it as a community. We tell the stories of the people, culture, content, events and issues that are making waves in communities around the Web. And to find and report on these stories, we have embedded reporters in those communities: Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, with more communities coming soon.

Just like our physical cities and towns, our online communities are constantly moving and developing, and they are full of interesting people doing newsworthy and important things. The Daily Dot’s mission is to cover these communities just like physical community newspapers cover cities and towns.

Where a town newspaper covers the latest high school sports game, the town meeting, the local crime report, we cover the story behind the hottest viral video sweeping the planet, the latest social movement in Facebook, and important issues (like cybercrime or online bullying) that are happening in our online neighborhoods.

When a major event happens in the physical world – like the revolutions in Arab world, for example — we don’t cover the events themselves, we cover their online footprint — what’s happening online that relates to the story.

The Daily Dot will also cover what’s happening around the Web in time: just like physical community newspapers have calendar sections – The Daily Dot has an online events section, provided in partnership with Live Matrix, one of our other venture productions, that aggregates the schedule of the Web. These two companies are highly synergistic and form the beginnings of our online media network.

While those of us in the Web industry have our fingers slightly more on the pulse of the Web, the vast majority of people who use the Web do not read industry blogs and have little or no visibility into what’s going on in the online world or where it’s headed. Other than a few articles a week published by mainstream media, they are not being informed.

It’s time for that to change. The Daily Dot will be publishing dozens of articles each day about what’s happening online. We’re writing for the mainstream, not for elites or geeks. The Daily Dot is for the people who use the Web — who live in it — not just the people who are building it.

Our content is designed to be entertaining, interesting, informative — and sometimes edgy and controversial – kind of like People Magazine meets USA Today, with a little bit of TMZ thrown in.

If you want to know what’s happening online, or you’re looking to find the hottest emerging entertainment, personalities, viral videos, issues, etc — and the stories behind them — The Daily Dot is your newspaper.

But The Daily Dot is not just a newspaper, it’s also a very interesting business venture. It’s a chance to build what could become one of the largest circulation newspapers in the world someday – a global newspaper about the one community that we all share in common, no matter where we actually live.

I also want to congratulate and thank the amazing editorial and development team at the Daily Dot, who made this possible. And most importantly, I want to acknowledge Nicholas White (Daily Dot CEO), Owen Thomas (Daily Dot founding editor), and Josh Jones-Dilworth (marketing guru), my co-founders in this venture.

Nick and Owen are leading business and editorial, and running the operations, and Josh and myself are on the board, advising to help in our respective areas of expertise. Nick and Owen deserve all the credit here — they have done the heavy lifting to bring this vision to market, and I’m very proud to be working with them.

Please join me us helping to spread the word about The Daily Dot — it’s your newspaper — and we need your help to make it great (and we look forward to your feedback and participation in the comments).

This is going to be a fun ride and I can’t wait to see how it evolves.

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 see it this way. It’s likely they will continue dedicating resources to competition instead of differentiation.

And while the social media gods fight it out in the clouds above us, what will happen down here on Earth? What about all of us, the little people — the users?

We’re entering a new era of social network chaos, and this, in turn, is going to create new needs and opportunities for startups.

The Sharepocalypse

Welcome to the “Sharepocalypse,” a new era of social network insanity.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE

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 my blog, I’ve explained the differences between these services, and what Google+ is really for and what it means for the rest of the social media giants:

1. Google+ is Really for Sharing Knowledge, Not Social Networking
2. Should Facebook be Worried About Google+?
3. Why Twitter’s API Strategy Must Change in a Google+ and Facebook World
4. Why the Google+ Developer Ecosystem Will be Different from Twitter

The conclusion I draw from all this is that instead of one social network to rule them all, I think it’s more likely that the social media landscape is going to divide into different territories, with each of the major social networks playing a different role.

Here’s how I think this all going to shake out:

• Facebook is for social networking
• LinkedIn is for business networking
• Google+ is for knowledge networking
• Twitter is for notifications

They just don’t know it yet.

Here is some more detail on this idea:

• Facebook is for social networking
  • Facebook is the new social infrastructure for the planet, and Google+ is no match for it. By social, I mean non-professional, personal, friend-to-friend and group communication. There’s a lot more happening in Facebook than this however: gaming, branding, groups, marketing. But all this other activity depends on the fact that people spend so much time in Facebook, socializing. This is very different from what’s happening on Google+ and Twitter as well.
• LinkedIn is for business networking
  • It’s the infrastructure for professional networking in the old-school sense – as in getting a job, finding customers, locating partners, hiring people, doing biz dev and sales, etc. LinkedIn is the most differentiated and focused of all these players: they know what they’re good at and they’re not trying to be all things to all people. Now LinkedIn needs to build more bridges into more third-party applications and services to keep people aware of it and using it.
• Google+ is for knowledge networking
  • Google+ is an infrastructure for sharing knowledge, not social networking. Knowledge has always been Google’s strength and core focus. Knowledge is not just articles, but the conversations around them, and these conversations are one of Google+’s best features. More importantly, because Google has such a powerful search infrastructure, and such a powerful computing architecture, they are in a position to combine Google+ with search and massive analytics and machine learning, to dynamically re-organize and connect both the Web and the real-time Stream. By doing this Google+ could be a potential successor for the Blogosphere, and could leap far ahead of other competing search engines as well.
• Twitter is for notifications
  • Twitter is really a notifications infrastructure. That’s what they do best, and what they should be focusing on. They are executing on the wrong strategy right now. They are trying to be a media company, but that is not their strength and others already are far ahead of them at that. But as an infrastructure for short notifications, Twitter has an opportunity to be unique and win, if they focus on that. Twitter has replaced RSS, for better or for worse, as the primary way people and applications share and track these kinds of notifications. Twitter could leverage this position to become the notifications infrastructure for the whole world – and for all of the other networks – even for G+ and Facebook – if they played their cards right and stopped focusing on competing for eyeballs.

Everyone, including possibly even the Google+ team, is currently thinking that Google+ is a Twitter and Facebook competitor. But I think in fact, Google+ is for something entirely different.

Google+ is not really for socializing; it’s for sharing knowledge. That’s what makes it different from other social networks. It supports more flexible access permissions on content, longer form content, threaded conversations, and soon it will integrate deeply with search.

In many ways, Google+ is a potential replacement for the Blogosphere, which always suffered from the lack of an integrated commenting and search infrastructure. Blog posts and the conversations that emerge around them are fragmented around the Web, but in Google+ they are all in one place. More importantly, in Google+ the conversation around each post is something you can watch growing in real-time.

I don’t think all bloggers will move to Google+, because it certainly lacks the power or customization potential of a WordPress or Moveable Type for example, but there’s certainly a chance that good portion of lightweight blogging market share may go there.

As such, Google+ may be more competitive with lightweight blogging services like Tumblr and Posterous, and with knowledge sharing and Q&A services like Quora, than with Twitter or Facebook.

But that’s just the beginning. By combining Google+ with Google Search, a new synthesis is possible that could make both the static Web and the real-time Stream better. This could be the next evolution of Google’s “organize the world’s information” mission. And this is nothing like Twitter or Facebook: It’s a totally different value proposition.

What happens when Google connects the power of their search engine and their massive compute capabilities with Google+? Both Google+ and Google search will become smarter. This is the Holy Grail of social search that we’ve all been talking about for years.

Google started out with a mission to “organize the world’s information,” and Google+ provides them with a new way to accomplish this. I think this is actually Google’s core competency, and what could be Google+’s unique role in the ecosystem.

Knowledge is not merely information, it is organized information. Google organizes the Web’s information via a search index, but with the addition of Google+ it can start to use the Stream to organize the Web, and vice-versa.

By connecting Google+ and Google Search, Google can figure out what Web resources are important to whom, by looking at the conversations around them. And it can figure out what conversations are important to whom by looking at the Web content and people they cite.

Most importantly, by capturing all this content and conversation in an environment where it can be analyzed, Google, can data-mine to learn things. Like who is interested in what, who is an expert at what, who influences whom, who is influential about what, and which content is relevant to various people or topics.

This will make Google’s graph much richer – and it will also enable Google to begin to do some new things with their graph: things like helping to guide people to conversations they are interested in, helping to connect similar or related conversations, helping people get answers more productively, helping to distribute content to the right people.

The reason Google has the potential to do this better than anyone else is not their Search engine; it’s their backend, which effectively is the world’s largest and most powerful supercomputer.

Google has unmatched computing capacity, and unmatched data to compute on. They are in the best position to do massively distributed computations that combine search analytics, social analytics, and machine learning on both the static Web and the real-time Web (“The Stream”).

With the addition of Google+ to Google, the Web is going to get a lot smarter, and Google’s original mission may evolve from “organize the world’s information” to “organize the world’s intelligence.”

But what’s important to note here, is that Google+ is for doing smart things with knowledge – not necessarily fun things. Sure, Google+ can be used to share the same viral videos that one shares in other places too, but what makes Google+ different is the control it gives around sharing, and the discussions that emerge.

Currently using Google+ requires quite a bit of thought. It’s not easy to figure out. There are many features that are hard to find, or that don’t quite make sense, or are simply non-obvious. At this stage it is still probably not ready for mainstream consumer use. And so the people who are making the most use of it are early-adopter types. This in turn affects the content that is being shared there. It’s pretty brainy in general.

But even once Google+ irons out its wrinkles, it may never be a replacement for the social fun of Facebook or the utility of Twitter.

Google+ is no match for Facebook at Facebook’s core value proposition: socializing. Facebook is way ahead of everyone on that front. Here’s why Facebook does not have to worry about Google+.

But at the same time, Facebook is unlikely to be able to compete with Google+ for knowledge. Google+ has the advantage of being combined with all the other Google products – especially Search – and the power of the Google supercomputer behind it. Facebook doesn’t have anything equivalent.

Google+ is also no match for Twitter at what Twitter does best: enabling everyone to keep up, via short notifications. In fact, Google+ is very hard to keep up with. Their content streams are full of massive posts that take time to read, and long threads that take up a lot of space on the page. It’s not easy to quickly scan and see what’s going on. And Google+’s notification system, while useful, simply cannot scale to notifying every user of thousands of things a day – at least not in current form – it would be extremely overwhelming.

So there are very clear distinctions here. Google+ is a very different kind of animal from Facebook and Twitter; each service has certain talents that make them unique from the others. There is a possible future in which they really don’t compete: they could each play a different but complementary role.

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 competitors? I don’t think so.

Google+ is not as geeky as Twitter, but it’s still too complicated for most consumers to want to use it.

Figuring out how to use Google+, and how to make effective use of it, at this early stage, is like trying to use an old shortwave radio. Actually, it’s like trying to figure out a shortwave radio that is only halfway built. This is not an activity my mom is going to enjoy.

It’s going to be a while before Google+ is ready for primetime consumer use. Facebook is way ahead on that front.

And there’s also the fun factor issue — Facebook has focused on fun: games, pokes, virtual gifts, and all sorts of social silliness that consumers just love.

The lack of play in the Google+ experience is actually a plus, not a minus, for many early users – there’s more signal, less noise, there – at least potentially. And this creates a self-selecting use-case: people are using Google+ for sharing ideas and having real conversations (and as of week two, not only about Google+ it turns out).

As of this article there is certainly an increase in non-serious content showing up on Google+, but it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to Facebook’s content mix. This could be an early-adopter effect that could change if more mainstream users adopt G+, but currently, my instincts are telling me G+ content is going to be more serious than fun. I’m not convinced the mainstream consumer audience is going to use G+ for fun.

Google+ is best used for sharing knowledge. This may result in Google+ filling a role that USENET used to play and that the fragmented blogosphere never really succeeded at solving: a unified knowledge sharing and conversation medium.

Hopefully the folks at Google+ will realize that the slightly more serious communication that’s happening in the service is a good thing. Instead of trying to change that by introducing more ways to play, they might want to consider celebrating it.

Keep out the silly social games, don’t introduce the fluff. This will preserve Google+ as a higher signal-to-noise communication channel and will make it unique from Facebook.

Hopefully Google+ won’t immediately integrate Zynga, for example, because that would totally ruin their differentiation from Facebook and take them in a direction they have no in-house DNA for: fun and games.

It’s just not too likely that the serious engineering and science culture of Google can replicate the lightheartedness of Facebook. And anyway if they could make Google+ fun, will anyone want it? After all they already have Facebook for that.

People are not going to use Facebook for serious conversations – it’s already too late for that. And they’re not going to use Google+ for superpoking. They can already poke each other to death perfectly well in Facebook.

Google+ is different from Facebook. And that’s a good thing for both companies. There may actually be room for both of them in this town.

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 instantly in the Chrome Web Store to a ginormous captive audience that is many multiples of the size of Twitter’s user-base. I’ve written about how Google+ can leverage Chrome to build an ecosystem here.

And if you succeed, your shiny new Google+ feature might even get you bought by Google for a million bucks. What engineer wouldn’t want to spend a few weeks making a feature that could net them a million bucks and a job at Google in a few months?

Compare that to what it’s like to be a Twitter developer today. Twitter has no plugin framework, no app store, no browser, no OS, and they are clamping down on their API terms of use, and even actively going to war against some of their third-party developers. And they don’t have the kind of acquisition budget or appetite that Google has. Twitter has only made a few acquisitions to date.

To make matters worse for Twitter, there’s very little loyalty to Twitter among Twitter developers right now – mostly there’s fear because of the recent Ubermedia and Tweetdeck situation, and Twitter’s recent moves to add their own photo-sharing, and soon their own analytics.

What opportunities are there really for developers on the Twitter platform, that Twitter doesn’t actually want for itself? Twitter has suggested that it wants it’s developers to “move up the value chain,” but to what exactly? How high should they jump? And if they do, will Twitter just pull the rug out from under them when they land?

This kind of FUD may very likely drive Twitter’s core third-party app developers over to the seemingly greener and safer pastures at Google+. And on Google+ developers can rapidly crank out new features as Chrome extensions, they don’t have to use an API. And this gives them instant marketing to a huge captive market of Chrome users too.

Now it’s worth noting that being a Google+ Chrome extension developer won’t necessarily be safer than developing on the Twitter API in the long run. But it will seem safer for a while, and that will be enough for many developers to go there.

Like Twitter, Google will be able to cherry pick the best opportunities on its platform. Any Chrome extension that really becomes a big hit on top of Google+ will be either acquired or copied by Google, and since Google owns the means of distribution (Chrome and Google+) there will be no competition for such deals (what buyer would compete with Google to buy a Chrome extension that Google wanted to own?).  But there is at least a 12 to 24 month window for developers to create value and potentially get bought by Google before Google starts competing with them.

Meanwhile, while their developers start moving to Google+, Twitter is likely to continue to focus on being a media company. This could be a fatal mistake.

Twitter simply does not have the reach of Google. They will never have it. Google is simply everywhere. It’s a completely hopeless battle to try to be a bigger destination than Google. Google has already won that battle. Twitter will never be as big as Google.

What Twitter DOES have — which Google does NOT have (yet) — is a massive installed base of third party apps publishing and subscribing to their message stream API. Assuming Google+ doesn’t come out with an API quickly, and that they drive innovation onto Chrome before they release a full API, there is a window of opportunity for Twitter to beat Google on the API front.

If Twitter focused on building around their real strength, their API, as I have suggested previously, instead of trying to become a media company and destination, they could have shot at long-term prosperity and differentiation as the messaging infrastructure of the planet. That’s a much bigger play for Twitter than being a media company, and it’s something Google+ is not positioned for. Twitter could win this.

(So why aren’t they doing this? What is Twitter’s management thinking? If you think you know, please comment on this article with your theory)

Twitter does not have the distribution and platform leverage that Google has, nor the huge installed base that Facebook has. And they have another problem: Twitter is still too geeky for mainstream consumers.

It’s just too hard to learn to use Twitter’s syntax properly. And the 140-character limitation results in all kinds of geeky abbreviations and conventions in the content and social behaviors in the system. Compared to other apps like Google+ and Facebook, which support long messages, richer text, and real threaded discussions, Twitter is going to seem cryptic and retro – like IRC.

No offense to Twitter – They’ve done something amazing. And I love geeks and count myself as one of them. So I totally get and like the geekiness. But it’s not going to work for mainstream consumers in the long-term.

Unfortunately, geekiness is hard-wired into Twitter’s DNA. It’s in the syntax of the app, their user-experience, and their culture. It’s also the in DNA of the core of their audience. So it’s not something that’s going to be easy to change. But to win the eyeballs war – the consumer war – you just can’t be that geeky.

So either Twitter has to undergo gene therapy to completely change their DNA to become a lot less geeky (unlikely), or they need to embrace their inner-geekiness and focus on their API and developers again: Cater to the geeks. Love the geeks. Make other geeks rich.

Is the Twitter/Apple deal the solution? Perhaps Apple could eventually buy Twitter and perform gene-therapy on them, transforming them into a more consumer-friendly product company. But if that doesn’t happen (and I doubt it will) then a deal with Apple is probably not enough to transform Twitter into a mainstream consumer product.

The key is that Twitter is not the same kind of animal as Facebook or Google+. Twitter is not a media company; it’s a notification company. It’s insufficient for creating rich content, or building rich conversations, but it’s great for short one-off notifications – and the 140-character limit is actually a good thing when viewed from this perspective.

Instead of trying to be a media company, Twitter should pivot back to fundamentals and focus more on their notifications API. This is what they do best. They should do this soon, and while they are at it, they should encourage third-party clients to build on this API again, instead of discouraging them.

By doing this right Twitter could become be the publish-subscribe messaging architecture for the world – including even for the other messaging networks like Facebook and Google+.

That’s seriously frikkin huge. And it’s unique too: It’s not something that Facebook or Google+ are technically designed or positioned to do. It’s what Twitter does better than anyone else, and it’s really what everyone is using Twitter for anyway.

How Twitter Can Win As an API

As an API focused company, Twitter could be woven into literally every app and service in the world as the means of publishing and subscribing to notifications of all kinds: Notifications between people and people, notifications between people and apps, and even notifications between apps and apps.

If they did this right, people might even use Twitter to keep up with notifications from Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, as well as every publisher, other apps, and individuals.

Twitter wouldn’t necessarily be where the content is created or where it lives – it would be how everyone got notified of the content. The value is in the API, not the eyeballs.

As a global notification infrastructure, Twitter would not be able to monetize the eyeballs on the content, but they could monetize the notifications by including ads in their notification streams, and optionally requiring services to pay to not include Twitter’s ads in their streams.

Here are some steps Twitter could take to make this vision a reality:

1. Buy Gnip and Datasift — the companies they presently (and inexplicably) have handed their entire API business to. Twitter should own these companies and be the source for its own data.
2. Provide a free and premium version of their API and firehose streams. The free versions carry Twitter ads, the premium versions don’t.
3. Stop trying to own and monetize all the eyeballs on Twitter.com and official Twitter apps. Instead, do a 180 and go back to encouraging third-party developers to build Twitter client apps again. Use these apps to massively increase Twitter’s reach, traction, and monetization. Distribute Twitter into the streams of any apps that use the free API, or make money from any apps that opt out of the ads and pay for an optional premium API.
4. Sell Tweetdeck to Ubermedia (or someone else) for $50mm. That would not only be ironic and hilarious, it would be brilliant. That money could be better spent on enriching their publish-subscribe infrastructure. Twitter should be working on becoming like a TIBCO, but for the entire Internet.

Twitter has to take evasive action to increase their surface area by letting as many apps as possible integrate their API. They have to spread out, instead of fighting to be a destination. They have to stop cherry picking their ecosystem and instead enable it. Twitter’s strength is their ecosystem and their massive surface area. Without that they will be marginalized.

We’re already seeing the beginnings of Twitter marginalization happening with Google not renewing their licensing agreement to include Twitter in their real-time search results. Microsoft appears to be following suit.

Twitter’s best move to counter this is to make sure that Twitter content appears everywhere else, in every app, in every website. But they can’t do this by trying to compete with those apps and websites for the same eyeballs. Instead, turn all of them into “Twitter clients” and build a massive distributed real-time ad network.

Twitter cannot win as a destination and they are wasting their ammunition trying to do that. Facebook has them boxed in on one side and Google+ has just flanked them on the other. They have to punch through or they will be totally surrounded. But they CAN win as a notifications infrastructure. And that’s their real strength anyway.

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 people, many times a day.

But that’s not enough. Google+ has to grow as a product – it has to innovate and evolve, to stay ahead of everyone else. And it has to get hooked into other products so that it become part of everyone’s workflow even when they are not in a Google-owned site or app.

Even with all the engineers at Google, Google+ cannot innovate or integrate fast enough on its own: it has to find ways to get third-party developers to do some of this work in parallel.

The way Twitter evolved was through their API: They leveraged a huge army of free engineering talent around the Web to build them into everything, and to prototype features for them to cherry-pick into their core app.

What about Google+? Will they innovate via an API in the same way? Actually I think it may happen a bit differently.

Google+ has something unique to leverage: Chrome, a platform Google owns. While Google+ may release an API as well, I think Chrome will be more of an early focus and leverage point.

First of all, Chrome is easy to extend and it has a marketplace built in now. Secondly, by driving developers to extend Google+ on Chrome, Google kills two birds with one stone: they get innovation on Google+ and they make Chrome even more necessary and valuable – it will be the best way to use Google+.

I think Google+ is about to explode in new features, and most of them are not going to come from inside Google: They’re going to come from outside developers extending Google+ on Chrome. And this may be Google’s trump card.

Within 6 months there could easily be at least hundreds of new Chrome extensions that add functionality to Google+ and within 12 months there may be thousands of them. If this happens it could completely change the game for Google, Twitter, and their developer communities.

Most of these Google+ Chrome extensions will be features, not full applications. The Google+ product team and M&A team will be able to sit and watch to see which ones get the most usage, and the best of those will become “build vs. buy” candidates for addition to the core codebase of G+.  Think of it as a massive distributed A/B test, a decentralized genetic algorithm to evolve the best new features for Google+.

As these Chrome extensions come out from all directions, they will increase adoption and usage of Chrome, and since they won’t be available on other browsers, Chrome will gain market share. So not only will Google+ increase traction, so will Chrome, and ultimately the entire Google platform.

Many of these Chrome extensions will be free, but some will be paid apps. And Google will share in those revenues. This could be a huge driver of Chrome as a platform in its own right and could really make the Chrome Web store into a big business.

But what about a possible Google+ API; where does that fit into this equation? I think it will certainly happen, but I bet Google will focus more on Chrome extensions first because an ecosystem of Chrome extensions driving eyeballs to Chrome and Google+ simply has greater value to Google than third-party apps using an API.

A Google+ API would be great for developers and third-party businesses, and ultimately for streaming Google ads into G+ streams in third-party apps. But it will not drive adoption of Chrome. Therefore, I’m willing to bet that Google is going to delay the Google+ API for a while. That will leave developers no choice but to make Chrome extensions as a way to build on the Google+ platform. And they will. Every developer I know is drooling about this right now.

But one thing that’s important to note – Google has some work to do to really enable a massive upsurge of Chrome extensions for Google+.

Some of the developers I work with have been poring through the G+ JavaScript and data streams. And what they’ve found is that Google has not made it easy to augment their streams. The code is highly obfuscated and it’s really hard to find what you need in there.

Writing third-party Chrome extensions to augment G+ is doable, but not nearly as easy as it should be. One developer called it “a real pain to find what you need in their code.” Google should make this much easier by making their G+ code and data much more accessible, readable and extensible by third-party developers on Chrome.

If Google+ can add more transparency and developer hooks, it could be a big win for them. Google’s famous “Not invented here” syndrome may then take on a new meaning – much of Google+ may literally not be invented inside of Google, and will happen in parallel all around the Web, leading to massive parallel innovation and developer adoption.

Now what should Twitter do about this? How should Twitter respond, and what should their strategy be? I think Twitter has to change their strategy and focus on their API: Here are my specific recommendations.

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 read a full-text transcript here.

Topics covered:

• My work over the last few decades
• Big life lessons I’ve had
• My recent “Venture Production Studio” concept
• Stealth ventures I’m working on (realtime web, wireless power, etc.)
• Intelligent assistants
• Predictions for the future
• Augmented reality
• The Singularity
• Do we have free will? Will that change as Global Mind emerges?
• The changing nature of individuality
• The Psychological Singularity
• The Global Brain – history and implications
• The WebOS – Which cloud will win?
• The Semantic Web – what it’s really for, is it being adopted?
• What level does the brain compute at? Neural vs. quantum.
• Nature of consciousness (Buddhist view vs. Western Scientific view) – “I think, therefore I am” vs. “I am, therefore I think”
• The nature of self & possibility of artificial selves
• The Singularity
• John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment
• Digital physics & cellular automata; Ed Fredkin & Stephen Wolfram
• Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis
• Buddhist views on ultimate nature of reality
• My relationship with Peter Drucker (my grandfather) and his influence (management, knowledge workers, social sector etc.)
• The shift to a now-centric civilization
• The fragmentation of the Semantic Web
• Freeing intelligence from human brains (like we did with knowledge)
• Symbiosis; Part vs. Whole – When does the Global Brain change to a new level of order?
• Beyond Homo Sapiens – What’s next? Cyborgs, collective beings, etc.
• Technological ethics – what kind of future are we building?
• Combining the best of Asian and Western intellectual approaches
• IBM-Jeopardy Challenge

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 a direction where they end up missing out on their biggest potential win.

If Twitter continues to go down the media company path, without incorporating their API into the plan, that could not only force a large part of their ecosystem to go elsewhere, but it could deprive them of a much larger potential infrastructure revenue opportunity, and could even end up costing them the company.

After all, Silicon Valley is littered with the  burned out wreckage of once-great media companies that failed create and keep third-party app ecosystems: AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo – to name a few. It’s very hard to maintain leadership as an online media company without an ecosystem of outside apps increasing reach, innovation, and stickiness.

In light of this, I’ve been exploring an alternate path for Twitter that leverages their API in a much bigger way, and this path appears to be a better strategy. According to my own experimental revenue  projections for Twitter, this alternative path is not only a good tactical move, but it’s a good business move because it increases Twitter’s reach, number of active users, and revenues massively.

….. Read the rest here.

I was recently honored to be invited by President Sarkozy of France to participate in the e-G8 Summit — a new and potentially useful summit of global Internet leaders, right before this year’s G8 Summit in Paris.

This event will bring together Internet leaders and political leaders, for two days of discussions about the Internet. The goal is to advise the G8 leaders on important issues related to the Internet.

I’m looking forward to this event, and I am hopeful that it will produce useful recommendations for the G8 leaders, and perhaps lead to an ongoing process to advise them on Internet policy.

But in researching and preparing for this, I have found very little information about the event, who the other attendees will be, and what the real motivations for the event are.

In addition – for an event of this magnitude, it is somewhat surprising that there has not yet been any significant press coverage of it yet.

So, in the interest of transparency, and in helping to bring together the community of participants, and in addition, to seek suggestions from others for what issues or suggestions we should focus on, I am going to unveil the information I have received about the event publicly, for the first time.

I believe this is the first time this information has been shared publicly, and I think you will find it interesting…

Then, in the second half of this article, below, I will discuss my questions about what this event might achieve, what we might bring to the table there, and in particular what  ideas or proposals you might have as well?

The Invitation

Dear Mr. SPIVACK,

In my current capacity as President of the G8, I would like to place the issue of the Internet on the agenda of the Summit of Heads of State and Government that will be held in Deauville on 26-27 May 2011. We are all in agreement that it is essential for our States to consider the development of the Internet and its economic, political and cultural effects in our own countries and throughout the world.

This commitment from the Heads of State and Government shows that the time has come to engage in genuine dialogue with the main world players in the information and communication technologies sector, particularly in order to strengthen the Internet’s major contribution to economic growth.

It is for this reason that I have decided to organise the “e-G8 Forum” in Paris on 24-25 May. Over these two days, the CEOs and the leaders of the Internet’s most leading companies and organisations will work together before sharing their proposals with the Heads of State and Government in Deauville.

Participants in the e-G8 Forum will be able to exchange ideas about cutting-edge products and services. They will also be able to discuss the challenges and opportunities which they believe relevant to the future of the Internet, offering their opinions on a wide range of issues, including for example human rights, intellectual property and technological investment.

Given the key role you play in the field of information technology, as an entrepreneur and a leader, I would be honoured if you could attend this unprecedented conference.

Nicolas SARKOZY

 

The Fact Sheet

e-G8 Forum
The Internet: Accelerating Growth
Paris, May 24-25, 2011

The French President Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy, as current President of the Group of Eight countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – is convening an extraordinary invitation-only meeting of the best and the brightest technology leaders from the G8 and the rest of the world. He wishes to include in the G8 Summit agenda the possibilities opened up by the Internet and to enable the e-G8 Forum to contribute their viewpoint and reflections to the discussions of the Heads of State.

The e-G8 Forum will be held in Paris on May 24-25, immediately preceding the G8 Heads of State and Government Summit in Deauville on May 26-27.

The e-G8 Forum is designed to inform the G8 discussion and encourage dialogue between governments and global media/technology companies. This year, for the first time ever, the Internet’s role in society and the economy will be formally on the G8 Summit agenda. Although invited on the initiative of the President of the French Republic, the stakeholders in the digital economy will be free to choose their topics, agenda, content and conclusions which will be submitted to the discussion of the Heads of State. That is why President Sarkozy wishes the e-G8 Forum to be a private organization, placed under the presidency of Maurice Lévy, Chairman & CEO of Publicis Groupe.

e-G8 Forum Theme: The Internet: Accelerating Growth. The reach and impact of the Internet, fast-evolving technology and the roll-out of broadband across the world have been huge contributors to economic growth, job creation, education and empowerment in the last decade – and this digital ecosystem will be critically important in accelerating global growth in coming years.

Location: Stunning custom-built forum space in the Tuileries gardens, located between the Musée du Louvre and Place de la Concorde in the center of Paris.

Participants: Strictly by personal invitation only, the e-G8 Forum’s explicit goal is to gather leading global players of the digital ecosystem. This high-level community includes CEOs, technologists, entrepreneurs, and industry experts. Forum participants are invited to an extraordinary e-G8 Forum Dinner at the Louvre Museum on Tuesday May 24.

Program: Combining plenary sessions, town hall discussions and private dialogue, the e-G8 Forum will include discussions on economic growth, social issues such as human rights, intellectual property protection and privacy, and the Internet of the future.

Ideas from the e-G8 Forum will be presented at the G8 Summit, for the first time giving a voice to leading companies investing in technology and the future of the Internet.

Organization: President Sarkozy has asked Maurice Lévy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, to organize the e-G8 Forum.

Press: For press accreditation presse-eg8forum@publicislive.com

General Information: info-eg8forum@publicislive.com

Website: www.eg8forum.com

The Agenda

e-G8 Forum
The Internet: Accelerating Growth
Pre-program

 

MONDAY 23 MAY
17h00 – 21h00: Welcome and Registration -Tuileries Gardens

TUESDAY 24 MAY

08h30 – 10h00: Registration, coffee and networking

10h00 – 10h10: Welcome & Introduction, Maurice Lévy, Chairman & CEO, Publicis Groupe, Chairman of the e-G8 Forum

10h10 – 10h45: Opening Keynote
Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, current President of the G8
10h45 – 11h00: Q&A with President Sarkozy

11h00 – 12h00: Plenary I
“Silicon Power: The Internet & Economic Growth”
Information Technology and the entire digital ecosystem have been a powerful creator of jobs and wealth around the world. How to ensure this continues?

12h00 – 13h00: Plenary II
“Rewiring Societies” The Internet has empowered people around the world, most recently and most spectacularly in the Middle East, but also in many other instances. Are we seeing the emergence of a new society: more open, transparent and free?

13h00 – 14h30: Lunch

14h30 – 15h30: Plenary III
“Future of the Net: What Next?”
Broadband, booming data, video, the explosion of cloud computing, storage: the financing of infrastructures, how value is created and shared

15h30 – 16h00: Coffee break and networking
16h00 – 17h00: Content and intellectual property
17h00 – 18h00: Conversations with legendary figures of the Internet
20h00 – 22h30: e-G8 Dinner at the Louvre Museum and private visits of the museum

WEDNESDAY 25 MAY
08h00 – 09h00: Continental breakfast and networking

09h00 – 10:00: Plenary I
“Innovation and Financing”
The impact of new technologies on strategies for innovation and R&D What are the best strategies for creating innovative ecosystems and clusters?

10h00 – 10h30: Coffee break and networking

10h30 – 12h00: Parallel Workshops I
1. Fostering Innovation and Education
2. The impact of the digital revolution on small and medium-sized businesses
3. Entertainment and Culture in the Digital Age

12h00 – 13h00: Parallel Workshops II
1. Mobile Internet: how mobile is transforming commerce
2. Protection of privacy and the youth
3. The Net and the Media: the future of media in a digital society

13h00 – 14h30: Lunch

14h30 – 15h30: Parallel Workshops III
1. In the Social Media Age: the impact on society
2. Creativity and entrepreneurship on the Net
3. Trust: Creating and maintaining trust in a world of booming data

15h30 – 16h00: Coffee break

16h00 – 17h30: Plenary II
“Start-up Nations: the best and the brightest start-ups”

17h30 – 18h30: Closing Plenary of the e-G8 Forum

My Thoughts and Questions

I am honored to be among the invitees and do plan on participating. However, that said, I also have a number of thoughts and questions about this gathering, its purpose, and the results that may or may not come from it. I am certainly hopeful and optimistic – but I also think an event of this nature will face a number of challenges.

First of all, this event is being organized rather suddenly, with very little advance-notice to potential attendees. So my first question is, who will actually be going? I am definitely attending, but I’m curious to know who the other attendees will be?

In searching Twitter for the terms  “eg8“, “e-G8,” “#eg8“, “#e-G8” I have found a few others, such as Leo Laporte and Jimmy Wales who have also announced their intention to attend. If you are attending, please announce it on Twitter at the hashtag #eg8 so we all can see who the delegates will be.

My second question is about the motivation for the event. Why is President Sarkozy organizing this event at this time? Is there a political agenda at work here, or is this simply to bring one of the major drivers of global society and economics to the table at the G8 level for the first time? Perhaps both are factors in the decision to do this?

It is also interesting to note that President Sarkozy, along with the other G-8 leaders, have generally supported polices which are not always in the best-interests of the people who use the Internet – for example, around issues of privacy, freedom of speech, taxation, and net neutrality.

Is this event designed to truly bring all perspectives together in order to craft new policies, or to build support for policies that have largely already been set by the G-8 nations?

Will this event result in helping Big Corporations and Big Governments be even Bigger, or will it also provide a voice to the people, the citizens of the Web? Will the delegates be thinking about themselves and their companies, or will they try to bring larger issues to the table?

Another question is what can be achieved in only two-days, especially when dealing with multiple very different cultures with widely divergent views about privacy, free speech, taxation, etc? I think this will be perhaps the main challenge of this gathering: will it be possible to bridge these differences and have not only a meaningful dialogue, but one that results in useful and new ideas and proposals for the G8 leaders to consider?

I am skeptical that it will be possible to reach any sort of agreement on such complex and controversial issues in a short timeframe, however, perhaps it will be possible for the delegates to come up with recommendations for Internet-related issues that require urgent attention from the G8 leaders, at least.

Another useful output of this event could be a new network of relationships that connect a broad cross-section of Internet leaders with government leaders at a very high level. The new relationships and communication channels that result from this could perhaps become very important in influencing and shaping policy in the future. In the end, this may be one of the key long-term benefits of this gathering.

What Should We Discuss?

As a participant in the e-G8, I hope I can contribute something useful, and hopefully novel. I presume many of the other delegates will be from giant corporations, and will have viewpoints that at least to some extent reflect the goals of those corporations. In my case, I am not affiliated with any giant corporation presently; I work mainly with small, emerging technology startups.

At an event of this nature, I hope I can help to represent the viewpoint of the startup community, entrepreneurs, innovators, angel investors, incubators, and consumers on the Web. This is a perspective that is often drowned out in gatherings of leaders of multibillion dollar corporations and large governments — yet it is also one that is extremely valuable, since the technology startup sector is actually a key engine of new jobs, economic development, innovation, and growth.

I think it is of vital importance to find ways to transplant the DNA of Silicon Valley into other regions around the world, so that this kind of new economic opportunity and growth spreads and benefits more regions.

Another area that I focus on is the future of the Internet. Where is it going, and what is needed to get it there in the optimal way?

There are many issues to discuss around this ranging from identity, privacy, open standards, open-source software, and net neutrality (which should be re-branded as “net equality”), to who owns personal information, copyright law, software patent law reform, accessibility, and infrastructure – particularly infrastructure that can’t be easily controlled or compromised by any one party.

I’ve been involved with the Internet since the 1980′s, and helped to pioneer the early days of the Web, as well as the Semantic Web, “Web 3.0″ and new initiatives around the real-time Web. These technology movements have captivated me with their potential for increasing human freedom and capabilities. But there is equally great potential to use them to limit freedom and control humanity even more.

What concerns me most today is that more power over the Internet is falling into fewer hands, and this trend is continuing with the eager support of big corporations and governments.

What is of greatest importance, for the people of the world, is to find new ways to decentralize and democratize the key capabilities of the Internet (such as bandwidth, messaging infrastructures, identity infrastructures, privacy systems, data storage, on-ramps, and even the content of the Web) and to protect them from attempts to control them, co-opt them, or limit them.

If we are not extremely careful and diligent in our efforts to protect the open Internet from commercial and government interests, I think it is likely that we will end up building an Internet that is a kind of prison instead of a launchpad for greater levels of human evolution.

Here is just one example of what I’m worried about – Facebook is now considering limiting free speech in order to placate governments around the world. But Facebook isn’t alone in this – all the large global online services are having to balance complex opposing concerns – and too often in these situations, money wins out over human rights.

Social networks are the cultural nervous systems of our new 21st century civilization. The problem is, they are being created and governed by commercial interests, not by their constituents.

If commercial social networks truly do become the fabric of our new societies, what happens to our civilization? It becomes privatized and controlled by commercial interests, not elected governments. Is that a world you want to live in?

The Internet is a new global resource, which, like the oceans, the atmosphere and the rainforests, must be protected in order to be of greatest benefit. It is something which every human should be able to share in, equally, and in fact, equal access to the Internet may soon become necessary in order to participate equally in any society or government.

One thought along these lines that I have been exploring recently: Do Internet users need to be protected with certain guaranteed basic rights and freedoms in their online lives? And should we all agree to a new online social contract, or even laws, for what kinds of behavior are acceptable? Is it time for these kinds of agreements to be formed?

Civil rights, standards of behavior and laws, are necessary for any society to function, and our emerging global online society is no exception. Perhaps it is time to propose the first Internet Bill of Rights, and a standard Internet Code of Conduct?

Of course, such initiatives are risky to propose – they could easily backfire and instead of promoting freedom they could become new means of limiting freedom. So I do not believe these policies should be created in a vacuum – I think they would require broad participation and comment from the entire community of Internet constituents. I do however think it is possible that such initiatives could be very valuable in the future.

What Do You Think?

These are just a few preliminary thoughts, but really I am more interested in hearing from you — what issues should the e-G8 be thinking about? What issues should we be proposing to the G8 leaders? And do you have any specific proposals to offer?

I am very interested in hearing from you, as I am sure the other e-G8 attendees are as well. Please add your thoughts in the comments below so we can see what you suggest and are thinking about. I look forward to being able to represent a broad perspective at this event.

Sincerely,

Nova Spivack
novaspivack.com

It’s been a busy week for the team at bottlenose one of my coolest venture productions.

Bottleno.se has developed a very powerful new personalization system that is optimized for making sense of Twitter and other real-time information streams. The product is in alpha and invite beta is planned for June.

It began when TechCrunch broke the story about the company, earlier this week.

That was followed by an interesting article by Marshall Kirkpatrick on the Twitter overload problem, and then a detailed article by Jenny Zaino about how bottleno.se hopes to solve that problem.

And, there was also a false rumor that bottleno.se might get bought soon which started spreading like wildfire online – but we’ve publicly stated that we not looking to sell at this early stage, whether or not there is interest.

ff you’re curious what all the buzz is about, sign up for the invite beta this summer. We’ll start letting folks into the beta on a rolling basis in June, in order of influence on the invite list, since the product is focused on influencers.

If you want to ensure that you get in early, you can show us your level of influence by getting other people to register for the beta with you, by tweeting or inviting friends via a special link we give you in the registration form. The more people who register via your links, the higher on our invite list you rise.

More news is coming soon, so follow @bottlenoseapp on Twitter, as well as @dominiek and @novaspivack (me) to keep up with us.

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 headed. At the time I was thinking a lot about the future of emerging online communities such as Digg, Facebook, the early days of Twitter, and even my own Twine.com — as well as about the growth of fully immersive games and virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life. I realized that these communities really were virtual places, and some of them literally even contained the equivalent of towns, leagues, guilds, nations.

But when I looked at how the media was covering the Web at the time, I saw a huge gap. Coverage broke out into two areas: stories aimed at an industry audience (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, Venturebeat, Techmeme) and coverage aimed at an early-adopter tech audience (Wired, Engadget, Slashdot, Boing Boing). But collectively, these audiences made up only a small slice of the overall Web audience pie.

Even more notable was that nobody was covering online communities like places — the way that newspapers cover nations, cities and towns. There were no local reporters, embedded reporters,  no stringers or correspondents in various online communities. In short, traditional media was covering the Web like a technology, not like a place.

Where was the coverage for the majority of the audience? The mainstream consumers who spent the better part of every day in this new place we call the Web? Where was the coverage of what was happening in the communities on the Web? The stories about the people on the Web? The stories for the people who used the Web?

Curiously, when I dug into this, I found that the mainstream was receiving scattered attention, in the form of only a few human interest or business articles per week in the major national media outlets (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CBS, NBC, ABC). Mostly these articles were either curiosities or they were about big financial deals around hot companies. They too failed to address the Web as a place.

While the Internet industry audience was being deluged with thousands of geeky articles and blog posts every day, the mainstream audience was for the most part being ignored by the media. My mainstream audience member friends confirmed this – they had no clue at all about what was really going on online – even around topics they cared about like brands, celebrities, music, major privacy issues that would affect them, the birth and death of major online services, new social trends and memes, new legislation, cybercrime. The small amount of this news they were aware of, reached them weeks after it was fresh, when the major outlets finally covered it.

I realized that here was an opportunity – in fact a need – for a newspaper that covered news about the Web for the people who use the Web — mainstream people. A newspaper by and for the people of the Web (in other words, all of us). A newspaper that would cover the Web like a place and as a community. In further discussions about this concept, my wife, Kimberly Rubin, came up with the perfect name, “The Daily Dot” and I went about buying the domain name.

The idea gestated and grew. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Finally, I decided this was a good enough idea to actively produce it in my new “venture production studio” — And so with that in mind I began looking for the right CEO and co-founders to produce the venture around.

As fate would have it, I had been introduced to Nicholas White through my longtime friend and PR guru, Josh Jones-Dilworth. Nick and I had been circling for a while. He had this “young Richard Branson” vibe — which everyone comments on after they meet him. I knew he was going to be someone important but I wasn’t sure exactly in what way.  Then it hit me.

Nick grew up in a newspaper family, working in the print newspaper biz. For over a century his family has been running community newspapers; Today they own 22 newspapers and radio stations. Like me and Josh, Nick had been thinking about the same problem — how to evolve community news reporting for the new millennium, but from the perspective of the newspaper business.

Nick was thinking about how to save the newspaper business — thoughts which he has elaborated on this week in  a new article about how he hopes to save the newspaper business by leaving it. As we spoke about the Daily Dot and his own ideas, I realized Nick had both the pedigree and the passion to build what I had envisioned. Nick was the perfect CEO for the Daily Dot. And so we invited him to co-found the venture.

With Nick’s experience at the helm, we are already making great progress. An example of this is last week’s announcement that the widely-followed editor, Owen Thomas, has left his position as executive editor at Venturebeat (a terrific publication that I read every day), to join Nick and the team as founding editor of the Daily Dot. And around Nick and Owen we are already growing a team of really awesome editors, writers, designers, coders, marketers and investors. It’s really starting to take shape, rapidly.

Owen in particular brings a strong editorial background, and is already helping to focus our strategy. We were all impressed by Owen’s incredible network of connections to the movers and shakers of the Web, as well as to the users of the Web — and also with his knowledge of all things media, pop culture, gossip, fashion, design, entertainment and more. He really understands what people use the Web for, and he’s got a great nose for news. In short he’s got exactly the right mix to head up the Daily Dot’s editorial strategy.

As Owen explains it, The Daily Dot, is going to cover the Web in a new way: It’s about people. We’re going to cover the Web not just as a technology or an industry, but as a community — actually a community of communities — spread across a virtual landscape of online places. Some of these communities, like Facebook, are even larger than physical nations, and contain communities within them that are larger than many cities. Others, like World of Warcraft, are complex parallel worlds complete with warring factions and their own economies.

And there are many other vibrant communities on the Web: Youtube, Etsy, Second Life, 4Chan, the Word Press blogging community, Tumblr, Reddit, and literally millions of micro communities around vertical interests. These communities have people in them — yes actual people, not just technologies and venture capitalists! And these people have stories, stories we want to know about. And so do the people who participate in them. But who is telling those stories?

Imagine a nation or city without its own daily newspaper — how would people know what’s going on, what would hold it together, would it even feel like one nation or city at all? A newspaper is a critical enabling catalyst that transforms a crowd into a community. It gives people news, but also a sense of place, a sense of belonging, a sense of community. It tells the story of the place, it holds the record of the place. On a deeper level, a newspaper provides a mirror of the whole back to the parts, enabling an essential feedback loop. In short, newspapers are the lifeblood of communities.

The Web today is like that nation or city without a newspaper. It’s missing something essential – the one key catalyst that will transform it from a crowd into an actual community. By providing the Web with its own newspaper, The Daily Dot will make the Web feel more human, more connected, and more cohesive. And this is really important.

The Daily Dot aims to be the community newspaper for the Web as a whole, as well as for each of the communities within it. And by doing this, we may just end up play a key role in the life of the Web. But that’s the just the beginning: We may also become the first truly global newspaper; the newspaper with the largest daily readership on the planet. After all, what newspaper today has 6 billion daily readers?

There is no geographic print newspaper audience that large. But The Daily Dot is not limited by geography; it has a real chance at achieving a truly global readership by covering the one community that everyone on this planet has in common: The Web. It’s the first newspaper that everyone may actually read every day.

The Daily Dot is still young – in fact we haven’t really even launched it yet. And as we launch it’s going to be a work in progress: We’ll be starting with a series of experiments, a newsletter, and some explorations of new approaches for involving the community in making its own news, and then we’ll be launching a major new site — currently in private beta.

Meanwhile, we’re hiring writers and editors, so if you share our passion for this mission (and you’re awesome) definitely apply. We look forward to hearing your stories.

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 and angel invest in a number of exciting new ventures. Several of these ventures will be launching soon, and so it’s time to begin telling the story of what they do, and the big idea behind them: a new approach to building startups that borrows from how Hollywood produces movies.

And in keeping with this, I’ve moved with my wife Kimberly Rubin (a TV producer with 11 movies to her credit), from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where Hollywood production studios began. I believe LA is a great place to build this concept out.

I call this new model of venture incubation the “production studio model” and in this approach I work as a producer of ventures, not merely a founder or angel investor.

As well as being a better fit for the needs of early stage startups than the typical angel investor or VC approach, the production studio model has enabled me to start a number of really excellent ventures, for less cost, in less time, than I ever thought possible.

Production Portfolio

But before I go into more detail about the model, here is the current portfolio of companies that I am actively producing. With the exception of Live Matrix and Klout (which were started earlier), all of these companies were started in the last year and will be launching soon:

• Live Matrix — The schedule of the Web. Live Matrix is the only guide to what’s happening, when, online – across all media types (video, audio, chat, gaming, shopping, and more). I co-founded and seed-funded this venture with CEO, Sanjay Reddy, and I continue to incubate it and actively participate, in the same way as I have since we began, by serving on the board and helping on product strategy, marketing and technology. Live Matrix is launched and busy making deals and launching new features. More news coming soon.
• Klout — Klout is the standard for measuring influence. I discovered the company when I was a judge at the SXSW Accelerator in 2009. I was really impressed with the founders and soon became the company’s first outside investor. Since then I have served actively as an advisor to the company. They recently raised a terrific venture round with Kleiner Perkins and are off to the races.
• Bottlenose — You’ll be hearing a lot about this venture soon. It’s a new personalization technology designed for the realtime Web and social media. I co-founded this company with Dominiek ter Heide. As well as seed-funding the company, I’m taking an increasingly active role in helping to build this company.
• The Daily Dot — The Daily Dot is a new online newspaper about the Web, for consumers. Most of the coverage of the Web today is targeted at the tech industry, a tiny fraction of the audience, but the Daily Dot will cover the Web for the majority of the audience: consumers who spend much of their day, every day, online. The Daily Dot hasn’t launched yet but it’s going to be an exciting company. I co-founded it with newspaper-industry CEO, Nicholas White and co-founder Josh Jones-Dilworth. More news will be coming out soon!
• StreamGlider — StreamGlider is a new visual real-time dashboard for tracking interests across various types of devices, starting with the iPad. It’s got a gorgeous user-interface and some novel features that are especially suited to keeping up with streams of rich media. I co-founded this venture with two leading technologists in the information filtering and semantics space, Bill McDaniel and John Breslin. This will be launching soon as well. More news will be available at launch.
• “Project Nikola” This new venture has a breakthrough new energy technology and is totally in stealth. This isn’t even its real name; even that is a secret, for now. What I can say currently is that it really works, it’s mind-blowingly cool and just may disrupt the entire power grid someday. But there’s still a lot of R&D to do before we release it.
• The Earth Dashboard. This is a not-for-profit initiative (yes, I sometimes help produce game-changing nonprofits too) that is working to create an interactive live dashboard about the state of the planet that brings together, and visualizes, all the key global indicators, in one place for the first time. This project is led by Medard Gabel, who worked with Buckminster Fuller, and the creative director is Mia Hanak and her accomplished museum exhibit design team.The Dashboard will be available online as well as in major physical public locations around the globe.

Several of these companies have a common thread – and a common passion for me — they are focused on helping people filter the Web in potentially disruptive ways. Some are using “Big Data” analytics, data mining and extraction, natural language processing, machine learning and semantics, to understand the Web. These are areas that I am deeply familiar with from my many years working around information filtering, AI and search. The Nikola project is an exception — it is outside of the Internet space but springs from a multi-decade interest I’ve had in radical alternative energy technologies.

A History of Incubation

Since 1994, I’ve been involved in starting companies as an entrepreneur, and since 2000 I’ve also been an angel investor. Through incubating numerous ventures (my own and those I’ve angel invested in), I’ve gained some experience into the art of incubating startups.

But one of the best experiences I had was starting one of the more successful incubators, nVention, at SRI, which I conceived of and co-founded with Norman Winarsky (now head of ventures at SRI) in 1999. nVention is now global and has launched more than 40 ventures.

Unlike many incubators, nVention acts in a very hands-on way. First of all, most of nVention’s work focuses around creating ventures to commercialize intellectual property that was originated at SRI. Secondly, nVention bring teams of internal and external experts together to help incubate its companies from concept stage through commercialization. In effect, nVention acts like a production studio, and the people who work there function like producers. It’s a model I’m emulating, albeit in a more grassroots and distributed way.

The Venture Production Model

As a producer, I work actively to develop new original intellectual property, or to source it from great innovators, and then I angel invest and/or bring funding to the deal, shape products and strategies, build teams, invent and develop products, and actively grow companies and take them to market. In many cases, the ventures I’m producing are originated by me, but I also have several ventures in my portfolio that were originated by others, or in partnership with others.

The key to this approach is that I usually get involved at or even before concept stage — even before there is a real team — and I actively work to shape it into a venture, from concept through commercialization.

To accomplish this, across more than one venture at a time, I partner with excellent people to co-produce these companies. In some cases I act as the startup CEO, in other cases my partners do, or we find and partner with the right person to be CEO. Often I find myself partnering with entrepreneurs and helping to coach them to be CEO’s. But in all of these cases, we focus on producing ventures together, as a team. And we’re all in it for the long-term. Because I’ve found excellent partners to work with, including excellent CEO’s where needed, I’m personally able to focus more intensively on helping each venture. This has worked very well so far.

The production approach to venture creation is quite different from the “fire and forget” or “spray and pay” (or “pay and pray”) model that many VC’s and angel investors are engaging in. Instead of spreading lots of fairly hands-off bets across dozens of companies, in the production model I really focus and get deeply hands-on with a pipeline of projects of various stages.

This the opposite of the index fund or hedge fund approach that some funds are taking in the Valley. And I think it is a much better fit for the needs of early stage companies.

The production approach is also different from what many incubators and start-up accelerators are doing these days. Incubators and accelerators play an important role in the startup ecosystem, but the key difference is that in the Hollywood-inspired production model I’m testing, I often start earlier in the process – before there is a concept, company, product, CEO or even a team. Many incubators and accelerators start later in the process.

Here’s how it works. My associates and I source candidate ideas both from our own stream of inventions, as well as from people in our network, and from other innovators we find or who find us. Next we “option” the best ideas with joint R&D agreements and/or with initial prototype funding to test them out. We then filter these prototypes and choose the best ones to produce.

We then form companies, build teams, develop business plans, branding and strategy, and bring additional funding together to develop the commercial offerings, launch, market, and grow them into full ventures. It’s a very hands-on process – and just like movie production, and we usually have a number of projects going on at each stage in our pipeline at once.

The process is similar to producing a film. With a film, first you have to create or find the story, then hire writers and a director, recruit talent, and build a production team, get the financing and early distribution deals in place, shoot the film, do post-production, get broader distribution, market the film and release it.  In the early stages of companies, we all wear many hats, and as they grow, we specialize. In my own case, I assume different roles and levels of involvement according to the needs of the ventures as they grow.

The New Role of the Producer in Tech

A key to this process is really in understanding the new role of a producer in the venture world. It’s not exactly the same as the role of an angel or VC, or an EIR, or even a typical “superhero CEO.” It’s a new role that connects them all together.

Another key is having a model that is designed to attract excellent producers and talent to team up with. To do that, I’m working with a structure that gives my partners a better opportunity than they can find anywhere else. Whether it is an externally or internally originated venture, the model I’m working with is, by far, the most entrepreneur-friendly deal in the entire industry.

In most of my ventures today I take a minority, or at most, an equal partner position, with my cofounders – even in the ventures I originated and funded. In some of the ventures I have angel funded, I have continued to maintain the original equity split with my co-founders, even as the amount of funding I have contributed has increased over time. Where other angels and VC’s take the approach that money is everything, I take the exact opposite view. Talent is everything. Talent is rare, and it’s the lifeblood of ventures.  I don’t believe it is healthy for any company to have the investors take control away from founders — too often that results in disaster. My model is all about cultivating and facilitating the founders.

Why do I do this? Because I believe that you get the best out of people when they really feel they own their venture, and when they feel respected and valued for their contributions. Part of this is because as an entrepreneur myself I have experienced life on the other side. I know intimately what it is to be an entrepreneur, and I know how some VC’s, and even some angels, take advantage of entrepreneurs and founders, suck the life out of companies, and destroy businesses by over-controlling them, and I vowed NOT to be like that.

The terms I offer are the same terms I always wanted for myself. No bullshit and no games. We all succeed or fail together. It’s a true partnership. I’m not betting the odds across dozens of companies and expecting only 1 or 2 to survive; I’m NOT doing shotgun investing like most angels out there, I’m making extremely careful, extremely deeply involved long-term commitments to build companies side-by-side with my partners. And I don’t just talk about this, I do it – my model reflects this.

At the same time, I also spend money in a different way than angels or VC’s. For example, in many of my projects I’ll start on spec with a developer and an idea. No money is initially invested. They work on the idea and prove they have the goods. Then if that works, there is a small grant to “option” it and we develop it further, much like a production studio options a story. I then work with the technical or product teams to see what they can deliver with this initial grant – usually a prototype. This is a test.

If the test goes well and progress is good, we make a production deal in which money, and time, are invested in stages, by myself and others in my network, as needed, rather than all at once. We’re not talking about huge dollar investments early-on, it’s frugal and careful, but it’s enough, and it’s extremely value-added. Later in the process, when the time is right, more money can be brought to work.

Building out the Production Studio

Another way I help my portfolio companies is by bringing pre-negotiated deals with handpicked best-of-breed vendors for many of the services they need. I bring the top law firms and patent teams, the best PR and marketing teams in the business, and accounting and HR services, from partners I know and trust. This saves ventures valuable time and money, and protects them from making early mistakes.

Once the ventures are aimed at a clear target and have something to show, we go together to other angels and venture funds in my network to raise the roll-out money. There’s no reason to give up equity until we need to. The result is that entrepreneurs who work with me end up owning bigger stakes of their ventures than they would if they worked with traditional angels and VC’s.

On the investment side, I’ve been meeting with interesting angel investors – some are pros and some are new to this – and we’re teaming up to jointly fund these ventures together. By working with a production team such as mine, angel investors can put their money to work with less hands-on effort on their parts – because we’re doing the production work for them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t involved – we consult with them as much as they want and we actively solicit their feedback and ideas at every step — but it means they can have confidence that an experienced team is doing the groundwork day-to-day. By working with producers like myself and my team, angels and funds can spread their bets without being spread too thin. If you’re an angel investor, or even a VC, and you’re curious about working with our network, drop me a line.

On my own side, of course, I have to be very picky about what ventures I get involved with, so that I and my team are not spread too thin as well. For that reason, we only allow for about 4 ventures in any stage (from concept stage, through R&D, to beta, and commercialization) of our pipeline at once. But this is a model that I think can scale as we add more producers and team members to the mix. Scaling this is an area that I am actively thinking about right now. If you’re an exceptional venture producer and you would like to be involved, get in touch. This is not about anyone being a superhero, it’s about creating an awesome and highly collaborative team, supported by an incredible network.

There’s so much more I could say about all this, and in time, I’ll write more about it.You will be hearing a lot more about this model, as well as all of the ventures we’re producing in coming months, as well as some new ventures not listed above that are in the pipeline and will become visible in the future.

In the meantime, I’ll be posting here and on my Twitter feed, about my thoughts and what we’re learning as this goes forward. I welcome your thoughts too — this is one of the reasons I’ve written this. So please don’t hesitate to ask questions, offer advice, or observations. Stay tuned, it’s going to be an adventure!

– Nova

The Scheduled Web is Here – Talk at NewTeeVee Conference

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 Web: concerts, interviews, live chat sessions, game tournaments, sales, popular Webshows, tech conferences, live streaming sports coverage, and much more.

It’s like TV Guide was for TV, but it’s not for TV, it’s for the Web. There are all kinds of things happening online — and while Live Matrix includes a lot of live streaming video events, there is much more than just video in our guide. Live Matrix includes any types of scheduled online events — but we don’t include offline events — to be in Live Matrix an event must enable people to participate online.

The site combines elements of a guide, a search engine, and a DVR, to help you discover events and then get reminded to attend them, or catch them later if you missed them.

The insight that led to Live Matrix was that the time-dimension of the Web is perhaps the last big greenfield opportunity on the Web. It’s an entire dimension of the Web that nobody has made a search engine for, and nobody is providing any guidance for. Nobody owns it yet — it’s a whole new frontier of the Web.

There are millions of scheduled events taking place online every day. Some of these events are very cool, some are very relevant — but there is no easy way to find out about them. To find out what’s happening when on TV for example, we have TV Guide, but there is no equivalent for finding out what’s happening when on the Web.

In my own case I kept finding out about cool online events that I would have participated in — concerts, conference streams, webinars, online debates and interviews, and sales –  if only I had known they were happening. I think many Internet users have experienced this.

Google, Yahoo and Bing all focus on what I call the “space dimension” of the Web — they help you find what’s where — where is the best page about topic x? — But they don’t help you find out what’s when — what’s happening now, what’s coming next. They only help you find out what’s already finished and done with. How do you find out what’s happening now? How do you know what’s upcoming?

It was an “aha moment” when this all became clear — there is a new opportunity to be the Google or Yahoo for the time dimension of the Web. Or at least to be the equivalent of a TV Guide for the Web.

Furthermore, All trends point to this being a big opportunity. The continued growth of the realtime Web (Twitter, etc.) and the emerging Live Web (video and audio streaming) has been discussed extensively in the media; most recently comScore reported nearly a 650% increase in time spent viewing live video online.

So with this opportunity clearly in mind I set about looking for a co-founder who would be the right person to team up with, someone who would be the CEO.

That person was Sanjay Reddy. Soon after I met Sanjay it was clear to me that he was the exact right guy to partner with: his background in media and technology were what impressed me (for example, he was head of corp dev, strategy and M&A at Gemstar-TV Guide, where he led the $2.3 billion dollar sale of the company to Macrovision, and he had also worked at other Silicon Valley startups and investment banks as well).

Sanjay and I spent quite a bit of time just talking about ideas and eventually decided to join forces. My Lucid Ventures incubator, along with Sanjay, seed-funded the new venture and named it Live Matrix, to go after our mutual vision.

Soon after Sanjay joined we were fortunate to be joined by our two highly experienced colleagues, Edgar Fereira (formerly VP of data for TV Guide Data and TV Guide Online) and Tobias Batton (serial entrepreneur, product manager, game designer). Then others joined around us.

Eventually we formed a small (but awesome) startup team and began working on a prototype and eventually an alpha. We debuted a closed beta preview at TechCrunch Disrupt last spring and received enthusiastic reviews. Now, today, we are releasing our public beta.

Read the full press release here.

I hope you like what we’ve created so far. But please note it is still a BETA. We are interested in your feedback and we already have a lot of feedback from our private beta. Here are some of the ideas we are working on for our next few releases:

• The Number One request we have received so far is to make it easier and faster for people to find events that would interest them. So for the remainder of the year one of our big priorities will be to add in more personalization and recommendations.
• We’re also working on new UI concepts, including some more ways to view the schedule of the Web.
• And we’re going to make it easier and faster for you to add events to Live Matrix — we’ll be launching improvements to our publisher tools section, as well more ways for people to suggest events for us to list.
• And we also plan to add new categories of events — for examples, Business, Technology, Games, and more.

So stay tuned! Live Matrix is just getting started. But this could be the start of something big.

ps. Here’s a screencast with a quick tour of Live Matrix

Live Matrix Demo from Doug Freeman on Vimeo.

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 more valuable than live content. But in fact, this may not be the case.

Live content has built-in perishability that makes it potentially more valuable than on-demand content – if relevant audiences can find it while it is live. If a piece of high-demand content is only live for a short period of time it can attract more traffic in less time, provided that people who would want to participate interactively (or even transactively) in it are notified beforehand.

More demand in less time translates to higher advertising revenues, or higher prices in time-based sales like auctions. A series of high-demand live events could actually earn more revenues than a series of on-demand content releases in any given unit of time.

A live event is only live for some limited period of time, after which even though it may later be available in archived form, the event is finished, it is no longer a live event. If you want to get the live experience and be able to actually participate in a live event, you have to be there. It isn’t the same to watch it after the fact. And in some cases, for example auctions, sales, games, contests and chats, if you miss the event you can’t participate and may not even be able to access an archived version (if you even wanted to).

Live events are the best of both worlds for several reasons:

1. They have extra perishability because they are live, giving people a stronger incentive to participate synchronously when they are actually happening. Furthermore, if a live event is also interactive in some way, it is even more valuable to those who are present. A good example of this is American Idol, where for instance, the audience can participate in the voting process that selects finalists. Interactivity makes the show more engaging and gives viewers a sense of ownership and personal investment in the content.

2. Live events can also be archived and made available on-demand, as well. The key to getting this double-layer of value out of live events is to schedule them so that they can be found before or while they are actually live. This amplifies the initial demand and attendance to the event, and also provides any archived version that follows an added social virality.

At Live Matrix we believe it is incorrect to assume that the television model carries over directly to the Web. The Web is an entirely different medium because it is two-way, interactive, both synchronous and asynchronous, and distribution is open to anyone and portable across any device. Television over the Web is going to be different than TV on cable and satellite networks. The fact that consumers can consume Web video content asynchronously is a plus, but it doesn’t obviate the need or opportunity for live synchronous content on the Web. In fact, for any event that requires or even wants to leverage interactivity, live synchronous attendance by audience members is a key part of the experience.

There are many use-cases where live synchronous content consumption cannot be replaced by asynchronous content consumption — for example a live chat, or a time-limited sale or auction, or a multiplayer live game. Even in the case of video and audio there are many cases where live synchronous content is more valuable than asynchronous on-demand content. For example who wants to watch the Superbowl months after the game is over? Who really wants to watch a major presidential address or a press conference weeks later? Who wants to watch video of election coverage months after it’s decided? These kinds of “timely” events are live by their nature, and part of the value of consuming the content is the act of doing it in a timely manner.

The value of live interactive content begins to become even more clear as on-demand content that is originally streamed live has the ability to generate more revenues over its lifetime than simply recorded, on-demand content alone. The Scheduled Web will thus even improve traffic and revenues for on-demand content, if that content can be initiated as live events, or at least paired with them in some way.

The value of the Scheduled Web will be realized as not simply a schedule of video content, but of all scheduled events of any type that take place on the Internet. While much of this content is valuable both when it initially goes live and on an ongoing basis as on-demand content after the fact, there is also a lot of content in Live Matrix that will be inherently and necessarily more valuable when it is live, such as sales and auctions or games.

In addition there is a new category of “exclusively live” online events that we may see emerge in 2011. These events will be one-time events, with no archived copies after they finish. They may be high-profile events where attendance requires paid admission for example. They will be marketed as special experiences – where not only do you have to be there to experience them, but where being there has special advantages, like being able to interact with others who are there and perhaps with the performers or celebrities involved as well. Some events may also offer backstage passes, or special break-out sessions as well.

For events like these — where the only value created is during the event’s live run — discovery must happen prior to or during the event for participation to take place. For these, the Scheduled Web is absolutely essential.

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 Web is something of a misnomer, however, because usually it’s not real-time at all –  it’s after-the-fact. Most people find out about things that happened on the Real-Time Web after they happen, or, if they are lucky, when they happen. There is no way to know what is going to happen before it happens; there is no way to prepare or ensure that you will be online when something happens on the Real-Time Web. It’s entirely hit-or-miss.

If we are going to truly realize the Real-Time Web vision, then “time” needs to be the primary focus. So far, the Real-Time Web has mainly just been about simultaneity and speed – for example how quickly people on Twitter can respond to an event in the real world such as the Haiti Earthquake or the Oscars.

This obsession with the present is a sign of the times, but it is also a form of collective myopia — the Real-Time Web really doesn’t include the past or the future – it exists in a kind of perpetual now. To put the “time” into Real-Time, we need to  provide a way to see the past, present and the future Real-Time Web at once.  For example, we need a way to search and browse the past, present, and the future of a stream – what happened, what is happening, and what is scheduled to happen in the future. And this is where what I am calling The Scheduled Web comes in. It’s the next step for the Real-Time Web.

Defining the Scheduled Web

With the Scheduled Web things will start to make sense again. There will be a return of some semblance of order thanks to schedule metadata that enables people (and software) to find out about upcoming things on the Web that matter to them, before they happen, and to find out about past things that matter, after they happen.

The Scheduled Web is a Web that has a schedule, or many schedules, which exist in some commonly accessible, open format. These schedules should be searchable, linkable, shareable, interactive, collaborative, and discoverable. And they should be able to apply to anything — not just video, but any kind of content or activity online.

Why is this needed? Well consider this example. Imagine if there was no TV Guide on digital television. How would you navigate the constantly changing programming of more than 1000 digital TV channels without an interactive program guide (IPG)? It would be extremely difficult to find shows in a timely manner. According to clickstream data from television set-top boxes, about 10% of all time spent watching TV is spent in the IPG environment. And that is not even counting additional time-spent in on-demand guidance interfaces on DVRs. The point here is that guidance is key when you have lots of streams of content happening over time.

Now extend this same problem to the Web where there are literally millions of things happening every minute. These streams of content are not just limited to video. There are myriad types of real-time streams, everything from sales, auctions, and chats, to product launches, games, and audio, to streams of RSS feeds, Web pages appearing on Web sites, photos appearing on photo sites, software releases, announcements, etc.

Without some kind of guidance it is simply impossible to navigate the firehose of live online content streams on the Web efficiently. This firehose is too much to cope with in the present moment, let alone the past, or the future. This is what the Scheduled Web will solve.

By giving people a way to see into the past, present and future of the Real-Time Web, the Scheduled Web will enable the REAL Real-Time Web to be truly actualized. People will be able to know and plan in advance to actually be online when live events they care about take place.

Instead of missing that cool live Web concert or that auction for your favorite brand of shoes, simply because you didn’t know about it beforehand, you will be able to discover it in advance, RSVP, and get reminded before it starts — so you can be there and participate in the experience, right as it happens.

We are just beginning to see the emergence of the Scheduled Web. Two new examples of startups that are at work in the space are Clicker and Live Matrix.

• Clicker, a site that mainly provides on-demand video clips of past TV episodes, this week launched a schedule for live video streams on the Web.

• Live Matrix (my new startup), is soon to launch a schedule for all types of online events, not just video streams.

Some people have compared Live Matrix to Clicker, however this is not a wholly accurate comparison. We have very different, although  intersecting, goals.

While Clicker is an interesting play to compete with TV Guide and companies like Hulu, Live Matrix is creating a broader index of all the events taking place across the Scheduled Web, not just video/TV content events.

The insight behind Live Matrix is that there is much more to the Scheduled Web than video and TV content. The Web is not just about TV or video – it is about many different kinds of content.

Applying a TV metaphor to the Web is like trying to apply a print metaphor to tablet computing. While print has many positive qualities, tablet devices should not be limited just to text should they? Likewise, while the TV metaphor has advantages, it doesn’t make sense to limit the experience of time or scheduled content on the Web just to video.

With this in mind, while Live Matrix includes scheduled live video streams, we view video and TV type content as just one of many different types of scheduled Web content that matter.

For example, Live Matrix also includes online shopping events like sales and auctions, which comprise an enormous segment of the Scheduled Web. As an illustration eBay alone lists around 10 million scheduled auctions and sales each day! Live Matrix also includes scheduling metadata for many other kinds of content — online games, online chats, online audio, and more.

Live Matrix is building something quite a bit broader than current narrow conceptions of the Real-Time Web, or the narrow metaphor of TV on the Web. We are creating a way to navigate and search the full time dimension of the Web, we are building the schedule of the Web.

This will become a valuable, even essential, layer of metadata that just about every application, service and Internet surfer will make use of every day. Because after all, life happens in time and so does the Web. By adding metadata about time to the Web, Live Matrix will help make the Web – and particularly the Real-Time Web – easier to navigate.

Online vs. Offline Events

One of the key rules of Live Matrix is that, to be included in our schedule, an event must be consumable on-line. This means that it must be possible to access and participate in an event on an Internet-connected device.

Live Matrix is not a schedule of offline events or events that cannot be consumed or participated in using Internet-connected devices.

We made this rule because we believe that in the near-future almost everything interesting will, in fact, be consumable online, even if it has an offline component to it. We want to focus attention on those events which can be consumed on Internet-connected devices, so that if you have a connected device you can know that everything in Live Matrix can be accessed directly on your device. You don’t have to get in your car and drive to some physical venue, you don’t have to leave the Internet and go to some other device and network (like a TV and cable network).

Note the shift in emphasis here: We believe that the center of an increasing number of events is going to be online, and the offline world is going to increasingly become more peripheral.

For example, if a retail sale generates more revenues from online purchases than physical in-store purchases, the center of the sale is really on-line and the physical store becomes peripheral. Similarly, if a live concert has 30,000 audience members in a physical stadium but 10,000,000 people attending it online, the bulk of the concert is in fact online. This is already starting to happen.

For example, the recent Youtube concert featuring U2 had 10 million live streams – that’s up to 10 million live people in the audience at one time, making it possibly the largest online concert in history; it’s certainly a lot more people than any physical stadium could accommodate. Similarly, online venues like Second Life and World of Warcraft can accommodate thousands of players interacting in the same virtual spaces – not only do these spaces not even have a physical analogue (they exist only in virtual space), but there are no physical spaces that could accommodate such large games. These are examples of how online events may start to eclipse offline events.

I’m not saying this trend is good or bad; I’m simply stating a fact of our changing participatory culture. The world is going increasingly online and with this shift the center of our lives is going increasingly online, as well. It is this insight that gave my co-founder, Sanjay Reddy, and I, the inspiration to start Live Matrix, and to begin building what we hope will be the backbone of the Scheduled Web.

Today I am announcing that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here.

This acquisition consolidates two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of a long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web.

As the CEO and founder of Radar Networks and Twine.com, it is difficult to describe what it feels like to have reached this milestone during what has been a tumultuous period of global recession. I am very proud of my loyal and dedicated team and the incredible work and accomplishments that we have made together, and I am grateful for the unflagging support of our investors, and the huge community of Twine users and supporters.

Selling Twine.com was not something we had planned on doing at this time, but given the economy and the fact that Twine.com is a long-term project that will require significant ongoing investment and work to reach our goals, it is the best decision for the business and our shareholders.

While we received several offers for the company, and were in discussions about M&A with multiple industry leading companies in media, search and social software, we eventually selected Evri.

The Twine team is joining Evri to continue our work there. The Evri team has assured me that Twine.com’s data and users are safe and sound and will be transitioned into the Evri.com service over time, in a manner that protects privacy and data, and is minimally disruptive. I believe they will handle this with care and respect for the Twine community.

It is always an emotional experience to sell a company. Building Twine.com has been a long, intense, challenging, rewarding, and all-consuming effort. There were incredible high points and some very deep lows along the way. But most of all, it has been an adventure I will never forget. I was fortunate to help pioneer a major new technology — the Semantic Web — with an amazing team, including many good friends. Bringing something as big, as ambitious, and as risky as Twine.com to market was exhilarating.

Twine has been one of the great learning experiences of my life. I am profoundly grateful to everyone I’ve worked with, and especially to those who supported us financially and personally with their moral support, ideas and advocacy.

I am also grateful to unsung heroes behind the project — the families of all of us who worked on it, who never failed to be supportive as we worked days, nights, weekends and vacations to bring Twine to market.

What I’m Doing Next

I will advise Evri through the transition, but will not be working full-time there. Instead, I will be turning my primary focus to several new projects, including some exciting new ventures:

• Live Matrix, a new venture focusing on making the live Web more navigable. Live Matrix is led by Sanjay Reddy (CEO of Live Matrix; formerly SVP of Corp Dev for Gemstar TV Guide). Live Matrix is going to give the Web a new dimension: time. More news about this soon.
• Klout, the leading provider of social analytics about influencers on Twitter and Facebook (which I was the first angel investor in, and which I now advise). Klout is a really hot  company and it’s growing fast.
• I’m experimenting with a new way to grow ventures. It’s part incubator, part fund, part production company. I call it a Venture Production Studio. Through this initiative my partners and I are planning to produce a number of original startups, and selected outside startups as well. There is a huge gap in the early-stage arena, and to fill this we need to modify the economics and model of early stage venture investing.
• I’m looking forward to working more on my non-profit interests, particularly those related to supporting democracy and human rights around the world, and one of my particular interests, Tibetan cultural preservation.
• And last but not least, I’m getting married later this month, which may turn out to be my best project of all.

If you want to keep up with what I am thinking about and working on, you should follow me on Twitter at @novaspivack, and also keep up with my blog here at novaspivack.com and my mailing list (accessible in the upper right hand corner of this page).

The Story Behind the Story

In making this transition, it seems appropriate to tell the Twine.com story. This will provide some insight into how we got here, including some of our triumphs, and our mistakes, and some of the difficulties we faced along the way. Hopefully this will shed some light on the story behind the story, and may even be useful to other entrepreneurs out there in what is perhaps one of the most difficult venture capital and startup environments in history.

(Note: You may also be interested in viewing this presentation, “A Yarn About Twine” which covers the full history of the project with lots of pictures of various iterations of our work from the early semantic desktop app to Twine, to T2.)

The Early Years of the Project

The ideas that led to Twine were born in the 1990′s from my work as a co-founder of EarthWeb (which today continues as Dice.com), where among many things we prototyped a number of new knowledge-sharing and social networking tools, along with our primary work developing large Web portals and communities for customers, and eventually our own communities for IT professionals. My time with EarthWeb really helped me to understand that challenges and potential of sharing and growing knowledge socially on the Web. I became passionately interested in finding new ways to network people’s minds together, to solve information overload, and to enable the evolution of a future “global brain.”

After EarthWeb’s IPO I worked with SRI and Sarnoff to build their business incubator, nVention, and then eventually started my own incubator, Lucid Ventures, through which I co-founded Radar Networks with Kristin Thorisson, from the MIT Media Lab, and Jim Wissner (the continuing Chief Architect of Twine) in 2003. Our first implementation was a peer-to-peer Java-based knowledge sharing app called “Personal Radar.”

Personal Radar was a very cool app — it organized all the information on the desktop in a single semantic information space that was like an “iTunes for information” and then made it easy to share and annotate knowledge with others in a collaborative manner. There were some similarities to apps like Ray Ozzie’s Groove and the MIT Haystack project, but Personal Radar was built for consumers, entirely with Java, RDF, OWL and the standards of the emerging Semantic Web. You can see some screenshots pictures of this early work in this slideshow, here.

But due to the collapse of the first Internet bubble there was simply no venture funding available at the time and so instead, we ended up working as subcontractors on the DARPA CALO project at SRI. This kept our research alive through the downturn and also introduced us to a true Who’s Who of AI and Semantic Web gurus who worked on the CALO project. We eventually helped SRI build OpenIRIS, a personal semantic desktop application, which had many similarities to Personal Radar. All of our work for CALO was open-sourced under the LGPL license.

Becoming a Venture-Funded Company

Deborah L. McGuinness, who was one of the co-designers of the OWL language (the Web Ontology Language, one of the foundations of the Semantic Web standards at the W3C), became one of our science advisers and kindly introduced us to Paul Allen, who invited us to present our work to his team at Vulcan Capital. The rest is history. Paul Allen and Ron Conway led an angel round to seed-fund us and we moved out of consulting to DARPA and began work on developing our own products and services.

Our long-term plan was to create a major online portal powered by the Semantic Web that would provide a new generation of Web-scale semantic search and discovery features to consumers. But for this to happen, first we had to build our own Web-scale commercial semantic applications platform, because there was no platform available at that time that could meet the requirements we had. In the process of building our platform numerous technical challenges had to be overcome.

At the time (the early 2000′s) there were few development tools in existence for creating ontologies or semantic applications, and in addition there were no commercial-quality databases capable of delivering high-performance Web-scale storage and retrieval of RDF triples. So we had to develop our own development tools, our own semantic applications framework, and our own federated high-performance semantic datastore.

This turned out to be a nearly endless amount of work. However we were fortunate to have Jim Wissner as our lead technical architect and chief scientist. Under his guidance we went through several iterations and numerous technical breakthroughs, eventually developing the most powerful and developer-friendly semantic applications platform in the world. This led to the  development of a portfolio of intellectual property that provides fundamental DNA for the Semantic Web.

During this process we raised a Series A round led by Vulcan Capital and Leapfrog Ventures, and our team was joined by interface designer and product management expert, Chris Jones (now leading strategy at HotStudio, a boutique design and user-experience firm in San Francisco). Under Chris’ guidance we developed Twine.com, our first application built on our semantic platform.

The mission of Twine.com was to help people keep up with their interests more efficiently, using the Semantic Web. The basic idea was that you could add content to Twine (most commonly by bookmarking it into the site, but also by authoring directly into it), and then Twine would use natural language processing and analysis, statistical methods, and graph and social network analysis, to automatically store, organize, link and semantically tag the content into various topical areas.

These topics could easily be followed by other users who wanted to keep up with specific types of content or interests. So basically you could author or add stuff to Twine and it would then do the work of making sense of it, organizing it, and helping you share it with others who were interested. The data was stored semantically and connected to ontologies, so that it could then be searched and reused in new ways.

With the help of Lew Tucker, Sonja Erickson and Candice Nobles, as well as an amazing team of engineers, product managers, systems admins and designers, Twine was announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in October of 2007 and went into full public beta in Q1 of 2008. Twine was well-received by the press and early-adopter users.

Soon after our initial beta launch we raised a Series B round, led by Vulcan Capital and Velocity Interactive Group (now named Fuse Capital), as well as DFJ. This gave us the capital to begin to grow Twine.com rapidly to become the major online destination we envisioned.

In the course of this work we made a number of additional technical breakthroughs, resulting in more than 20 patent filings in total, including several fundamental patents related to semantic data management, semantic portals, semantic social networking, semantic recommendations, semantic advertising, and semantic search.

Four of those patents have been granted so far and the rest are still pending — and perhaps the most interesting of these patents are related to our most recent work on “T2″ and are not yet visible.

At the time of beta launch and for almost six months after, Twine was still very much a work in progress. Fortunately our users and the press were fairly forgiving as we worked through evolving the GUI and feature set from what was initially just slightly better than an alpha site to the highly refined and graphical UI we have today.

During these early days of Twine.com we were fortunate to have a devoted user-base and this became a thriving community of power-users who really helped us to refine the product and develop great content within it.

Rapid Growth, and Scaling Challenges

As Twine grew the community went through many changes and some growing pains, and eventually crossed the chasm to a more mainstream user-base. Within less than a year from launch the site grew to around 3 million monthly visitors, 300,000 registered users, 25,000 “twines” about various interests, and almost 5 million pieces of user-contributed content. It was on its way to becoming the largest semantic web on the Web.

By all accounts Twine was looking like a potential “hit.” During this period the company staff increased to more than 40 people (inclusive of contractors and offshore teams) and our monthly burn rate increased to aggressive levels of spending to keep up with growth.

Despite this growth and spending we still could not keep up with demand for new features and at times we experienced major scaling and performance challenges. We had always planned for several more iterations of our backend architecture to facilitate scaling the system. But now we could see the writing on the wall — we had to begin to develop a more powerful, more scalable backend for Twine, much sooner than we had expected we would need to.

This required us to increase our engineering spending further in order to simultaneously support the live version of Twine and its very substantial backend, and run a parallel development team working on the next generation of the backend and the next version of Twine on top of it. Running multiple development teams instead of one was a challenging and costly endeavor. The engineering team was stretched thin and we were all putting in 12 to 15 hour days every day.

Breakthrough to “T2″

We began to work in earnest on a new iteration of our back-end architecture and application framework — one that could scale fast enough to keep up with our unexpectedly fast growth rate and the increasing demands on our servers that this was causing.

This initiative yielded unexpected fruit. Not only did we solve our scaling problems, but we were able to do so to such a degree that entirely new possibilities were opened up to us — ones that had previously been out of reach for purely technical reasons. In particular, semantic search.

Semantic search had always been a long-term goal of ours, however, in the first version of Twine (the one that is currently online) search was our weakest feature area, due to the challenge of scaling a semantic datastore to handle hundreds of billions of triples. But our user-studies revealed that it was in fact the feature our users wanted us to develop the most – search slowly became the dominant paradigm within Twine, especially when the content in our system reached critical mass.

Our new architecture initiative solved the semantic search problem to such a degree that we realized that not only could we scale Twine.com, we could scale it to eventually become a semantic search engine for the entire Web.

Instead of relying on users to crowdsource only a subset of the best content into our index, we could crawl large portions of the Web automatically and ingest millions and millions of Web pages, process them, and make them semantically searchable — using a true W3C Semantic Web compliant backend. (Note: Why did we even attempt to do this? We believed strongly in supporting open-standards for the Semantic Web, despite the fact that they posed major technical challenges and required tools that did not exist yet, because they promised to enable semantic application and data interoperability, one of the main potential benefits of the Semantic Web).

Based on our newfound ability to do Web-scale semantic search, we began planning the next version of Twine — Twine 2.0 (“T2″), with the help of Bob Morgan, Mark Erickson, Sasi Reddy, and a team of great designers.

The new T2 plan would merge new faceted semantic search features with the existing social, personalization and knowledge management features of Twine 1.0. It would be the best of both worlds: semantic search + social search. We began working intensively on developing T2, along with a new hosted developer tools that would make it easy for any webmaster to easily add their site into our semantic index. We were certain that with T2 we had finally “cracked the code” to the Semantic Web — we had a product plan and a strategy that could really bring the Semantic Web to everyone on the Web. It elegantly solved the key challenges to adoption and on a technical level, using SOLR instead of a giant triplestore, we were able to scale to unprecedented levels. It was an exciting plan and everyone on the team was confident in the direction.

To see screenshots that demo T2 and our hosted development tools click here.

The Global Recession

Our growth was fast, and so was our spending, but at the time this seemed logical because the future looked bright and we were in a race to keep ahead of our own curve. We were quickly nearing a point where we would soon need to raise another round of funding to sustain our pace, but we were confident that with our growth trends steadily increasing and our exciting plans for T2, the necessary funding would be forthcoming at favorable valuations.

We were wrong.

The global economy crashed unexpectedly, throwing a major curveball in our path. We had not planned on that happening and it certainly was inconvenient to say the least.

The recession not only hit Wall Street, it hit Silicon Valley. Venture capital funding dried up almost overnight. VC funds sent alarming letters to their portfolio companies warning of dire financial turmoil ahead. Many startups were forced to close their doors, while others made drastic sudden layoffs for better or for worse. We too made spending cuts, but we were limited in our ability to slash expenses until the new T2 platform could be completed. Once that was done, we would be able to move Twine to a much more scalable and less costly architecture, and we would no longer need parallel development teams. But until that happened, we still had to maintain a sizeable infrastructure and engineering effort.

As the recession dragged on, and the clock kept ticking down, the urgency of raising a C round increased, and finally we were faced with a painful decision. We had to drastically reduce our spending in order to wait out the recession and live to raise more funding in the future.

Unfortunately, the only way to accomplish such a drastic reduction in spending was to lay off almost 30% of our staff and cut our monthly spending by almost 40%. But by doing that we could not possibly continue to work on as many fronts as we had been doing. The result was that we had to stop most work on Twine 1.0 (the version that was currently online) and focus all our remaining development cycles and spending on the team needed to continue our work on T2.

This was extremely painful for me as the CEO, and for everyone on our team. But it was necessary for the survival of the business and it did buy us valuable time. However, it also slowed us down tremendously. The irony of making this decision was that it reduced our burn-rate but slowed us down, reduced productivity, and cost us time to such a degree that in the end it may have cost us the same amount of money anyway.

While much of our traffic had been organic and direct, we also had a number of marketing partnerships and PR initiatives that we had to terminate. In addition, as part of this layoff we lost our amazing and talented marketing team, as well as half our product management team, our entire design team, our entire marketing and PR budget, and much of our support and community management team. This made it difficult to continue to promote the site, launch new features, fix bugs, or to support our existing online community. And as a result the service began to decline and usage declined along with it.

To make matters worse, at around the same time as we were making these drastic cuts, Google decided to de-index Twine. To this day we still are not sure why they decided to do this – it could have been that Google suddenly decided we were a competitive search engine, or it could be that their algorithm changed, or it could be that there was some error in our HTML markup that may have caused an indexing problem. We had literally millions of pages of topical user-generated content – but all of a sudden we saw drastic reductions in the number of pages being indexed, and in the ranking of those pages. This caused a very significant drop in organic traffic. With what little team I had remaining we spent time petitioning Google and trying to get reinstated. But we never managed to return to our former levels of index prominence.

Eventually, with all these obstacles, and the fact that we had to focus our remaining budget on T2, we put Twine.com on auto-pilot and let the traffic fall off, believing that we would have the opportunity to win it back once we launched next versipn. While painful to watch, this reduction in traffic and user activity at least had the benefit of reducing the pressure on the engineering team to scale the system and support it under load, giving us time to focus all our energy on getting T2 finished and on raising more funds.

But the recession dragged on and on and on, without end. VC’s remained extremely conservative and risk-averse. Meanwhile, we focused our internal work on growing a large semantic index of the Web in T2, vertical by vertical, starting with food, then games, and then many other topics (technology, health, sports, etc.). We were quite confident that if we could bring T2 to market it would be a turning point for Web search, and funding would follow.

Meanwhile we met with VC’s in earnest. But nobody was able to invest in anything due to the recession. Furthermore we were a pre-revenue company working on a risky advanced technology and VC partnerships were far too terrified by the recession to make such a bet. We encountered the dreaded “wait and see” response.

The only way we could get the funding we needed to continue was to launch T2, grow it, and generate revenues from it, but the only way we could reach those milestones was to launch T2 in the first place: a classic catch-22 situation.

We took comfort in the fact that we were not alone in this predicament. Almost every tech company at our stage was facing similar funding challenges. However, we were determined to find a solution despite the obstacles in our path.

Selling the Business

Had the recession not happened, I believe we would have raised a strong C round based on the momentum of the product and our technical achievements. Unfortunately, we, like many other early-stage technology ventures, found ourselves in the worst capital crunch in decades.

We eventually came to the conclusion that there was no viable path for the company but to use the runway we had left to sell to another entity that was more able to fund the ongoing development and marketing necessary to monetize T2.

While selling the company had always been a desirable exit strategy, we had hoped to do it after the launch and growth of T2. However, we could not afford to wait any longer. With some short-term bridge funding from our existing investors, we worked with Growth Point Technology Partners to sell the company.

We met with a number of the leading Internet and media companies and received numerous offers. In the end, the best and most strategically compatible offer came from Evri, one of our sibling companies in Vulcan Capital’s portfolio. While we had the option to sell to larger and more established companies with very compelling offers, it was simply the best option to join Evri.

And so we find ourselves at the present day. We got the best deal possible for our shareholders given the circumstances. Twine.com, my team, our users and their data are safe and sound. As an entrepreneur and CEO it is, as one advisor put it, of the utmost importance to always keep the company moving forward. I feel that I did manage to achieve this under extremely difficult economic circumstances. And for that I am grateful.

Outlook for the Semantic Web

I’ve been one of the most outspoken advocates of the Semantic Web during my tenure at Twine. So what about my outlook for the Semantic Web now that Twine is being sold and I’m starting to do other things? Do I still believe in the promise of the Semantic Web vision? Where is it going? These are questions I expect to be asked, so I will attempt to answer them here.

I continue to believe in the promise of semantic technologies, and in particular the approach of the W3C semantic web standards (RDF, OWL, SPARQL). That said, having tried to bring them to market as hard as anyone ever has, I can truly say they present significant challenges both to developers and to end-users. These challenges all stem from one underlying problem: Data storage.

Existing SQL databases are not optimal for large-scale, high-performance semantic data storage and retrieval. Yet triplestores are still not ready for prime-time. New graph databases and column stores show a lot of promise, but they are still only beginning to emerge. This situation makes it incredibly difficult to bring Web-scale semantic applications to market cost-effectively.

Enterprise semantic applications are much more feasible today however — because existing and emerging databases and semantic storage solutions do scale to enterprise levels. But for consumer-grade, enormous, Web services, there are still challenges. This is single greatest technical obstacle that Twine faced and it cost us a large amount of our venture funding to surmount. Finally we did find a solution with our T2 architecture, but it is still not a general solution for all types of applications.

I have recently seen some new graph data storage products that may provide the levels of scale and performance needed, but pricing has not been determined yet. In short, storage and retrieval of semantic graph datasets is a big unsolved challenge that is holding back the entire industry. We need federated database systems that can handle hundreds of billions to trillions of triples under high load conditions, in the cloud, on commodity hardware and open source software. Only then will it be affordable to make semantic applications and services at Web-scale.

I believe that semantic metadata is essential for the growth and evolution of the Web. It is one of the only ways we can hope to dig out from the increasing problem of information overload. It is one of the only ways to make search, discovery, and collaboration smart enough to really be significantly better than it is today.

But the notion that everyone will learn and adopt standards for creating this metadata themselves is flawed in my opinion. They won’t. Instead, we must focus on solutions (like Twine and Evri) that make this metadata automatically by analyzing content semantically. I believe this is the most practical approach to bringing the value of semantic search and discovery to consumers, as well as Webmasters and content providers around the Web.

The major search engines are all working on various forms of semantic search, but to my knowledge none of them are fully supporting the W3C standards for the Semantic Web. In some cases this is because they are attempting to co-opt the standards for their own competitive advantage, and in other cases it is because it is simply easier not to use them. But in taking the easier path, they are giving up the long-term potential gains of a truly open and interoperable semantic ecosystem.

I do believe that whoever enables this open semantic ecosystem first will win in the end — because it will have greater and faster network effects than any closed competing system. That is the promise and beauty of open standards: everyone can feel safe using them since no single commercial interest controls them. At least that’s the vision I see for the Semantic Web.

As far as where the Semantic Web will add the most value in years to come, I think we will see it appear in some new areas. First and foremost is e-commerce, an area that is ripe with structured data that needs to be normalized, integrated and made more searchable. This is perhaps the most potentially profitable and immediately useful application of semantic technologies. It’s also one where there has been very little innovation. But imagine if eBay or Amazon or Salesforce.com provided open-standards-compliant semantic metadata and semantic search across all their data.

Another important opportunity is search and SEO — these are the areas that Twine’s T2 project focused on, by enabling webmasters to easily and semi-automatically add semantic descriptions of their content into search indexes, without forcing them to learn RDF and OWL and do it manually. This would create a better SEO ecosystem and would be beneficial not only to content providers and search engines, but also to advertisers. This is the approach that I believe the major search engines should take.

Another area where semantics could add a lot of value is social media — by providing semantic descriptions of user profiles and user profile data, as well as social relationships on the Web, it would be possible to integrate and search across all social networks in a unified manner.

Finally, another area where semantics will be beneficial is to enable easier integration of datasets and applications around the Web — currently every database is a separate island, but by using the Semantic Web appropriately data can be freed from databases and easily reused, remixed and repurposed by other applications. I look forward to the promise of a truly open data layer on the Web, when the Web becomes essentially one big open database that all applications can use.

Lessons Learned and Advice for Startups

While the outcome for Twine was decent under the circumstances, and was certainly far better than the alternative of simply running out of money, I do wonder how it could have been different. I ask myself what I learned and what I would do differently if I had the chance or could go back in time.

I think the most important lessons I learned, and the advice that I would give to other entrepreneurs can be summarized with a few key points:

1. Raise as little venture capital as possible. Raise less than you need, not more than you need. Don’t raise extra capital just because it is available. Later on it will make it harder to raise further capital when you really need it. If you can avoid raising venture capital at all, do so. It comes with many strings attached. Angel funding is far preferable. But best of all, self-fund from revenues as early as you can, if possible. If you must raise venture capital, raise as little as you can get by on — even if they offer you more. But make sure you have at least enough to reach your next funding round — and assume that it will take twice as long to close as you think. It is no easy task to get a startup funded and launched in this economy — the odds are not in your favor — so play defense, not offense, until conditions improve (years from now).
2. Build for lower exits. Design your business model and capital strategy so that you can deliver a good ROI to your investors at an exit under $30mm. Exit prices are going lower, not higher. There is less competition and fewer buyers and they know it’s a buyer’s market. So make sure your capital strategy gives the option to sell in lower price ranges. If you raise too much you create a situation where you either have to sell at a loss, or raise even more funding which only makes the exit goal that much harder to reach.
3. Spend less. Spend less than you want to, less than you need to, and less than you can. When you are flush with capital it is tempting to spend it and grow aggressively, but don’t. Assume the market will crash — downturns are more frequent and last longer than they used to. Expect that. Plan on it. And make sure you keep enough capital in reserve to spend 9 to 12 months raising your next round, because that is how long it takes in this economy to get a round done.
4. Don’t rely on user-traction to raise funding. You cannot assume that user traction is enough to get your next round done. Even millions of users and exponential growth are not enough. VC’s and their investment committees want to see revenues, and particularly at least breakeven revenues. A large service that isn’t bringing in revenues yet is not a business, it’s an experiment. Perhaps it’s one that someone will buy, but if you can’t find a buyer then what? Don’t assume that VC’s will fund it. They won’t. Venture capital investing has changed dramatically — early stage and late stage deals are the only deals that are getting real funding. Mid-stage companies are simply left to die, unless they are profitable or will soon be profitable.
5. Don’t be afraid to downsize when you have to. It sucks to fire people, but it’s sometimes simply necessary. One of the worst mistakes is to not fire people who should be fired, or to not do layoffs when the business needs require it. You lose credibility as a leader if you don’t act decisively. Often friendships and personal loyalties prevent or delay leaders from firing people that really should be fired. While friendship and loyalty are noble they unfortunately are not always the best thing for the business. It’s better for everyone to take their medicine sooner rather than later. Your team knows who should be fired. Your team knows when layoffs are needed. Ask them. Then do it. If you don’t feel comfortable firing people, or you can’t do it, or you don’t do it when you need to, don’t be the CEO.
6. Develop cheaply, but still pay market salaries. Use offshore development resources, or locate your engineering team outside of the main “tech hub” cities. It is simply too expensive to compete with large public and private tech companies to pay top dollar for engineering talent in places like San Francisco and Silicon Valley.  The cost of top-level engineers is too high in major cities to be affordable and the competition to hire and retain them is intense. If you can get engineers to work for free or for half price then perhaps you can do it, but I believe you get what you pay for. So rather thank skimp on salaries, pay people market salaries, but do it where market salaries are more affordable.
7. Only innovate on one frontier at a time. For example, either innovate by making a new platform, or a new application, or a new business model. Don’t do all of these at once, it’s just too hard. If you want to make a new platform, just focus on that, don’t try to make an application too. If you want to make a new application, use an existing platform rather than also building a platform for it. If you want to make a new business model, use an existing application and platform — they can be ones you have built in the past, but don’t attempt to do it all at once. If you must do all three, do them sequentially, and make sure you can hit cash flow breakeven at each stage, with each one. Otherwise you’re at risk in this economy.

I hope that this advice is of some use to entrepreneurs (and VC’s) who are reading this. I’ve personally made all these mistakes myself, so I am speaking from experience. Hopefully I can spare you the trouble of having to learn these lessons the hard way.

What we did Well

I’ve spent considerable time in this article focusing on what didn’t go according to plan, and the mistakes we’ve learned from. But it’s also important to point out what we did right. I’m proud of the fact that Twine accomplished many milestones, including:

• Pioneering the Semantic Web and leading the charge to make it a mainstream topic of conversation.
• Creating the most powerful, developer friendly, platform for the Semantic Web.
• Successfully completing our work on CALO, the largest Semantic Web project in the US.
• Launching the first mainstream consumer application of Semantic Web.
• Having a very successful launch, covered by hundreds of articles.
• Gaining users extremely rapidly — faster than Twitter did in it’s early years.
• Hiring and retaining an incredible team of industry veterans.
• Raising nearly $24mm of venture capital over 2 rounds, because our plan was so promising.
• Developing more than 20 patents, several of which are fundamentally important for the Semantic Web field.
• Surviving two major economic bubbles and the downturns that followed.
• Innovating and most of all, adapting to change rapidly.
• Breaking through to T2 — a truly awesome technological innovation for Web-scale semantic search.
• Selling the company in one of the most difficult economic environments in history.

I am proud of what we accomplished with Twine. It’s been “a long strange trip” but one that has been full of excitement and accomplishments to remember.

Conclusions

If you’ve actually read this far, thank you. This is a big article, but after all, Twine is a big project – One that lasted nearly 5 years (or 9 years if you include our original research phase). I’m still bullish on the Semantic Web, and genuinely very enthusiastic about what Evri will do with Twine.com going forward.

Again I want to thank the hundreds of people who have helped make Twine possible over the years – but in particular the members of our technical and management team who went far beyond the call of duty to get us to the deal we have reached with Evri.

While this is certainly the end of an era, I believe that this story has only just begun. The first chapters are complete and now we are moving into a new era. Much work remains to be done and there are certainly still challenges and unknowns, but progress continues and the Semantic Web is here to stay.

The human brain is like an archaeological record. Different layers and functional areas have evolved outwards over time. And now a new layer is evolving. I propose we call this new layer of the brain “the metacortex.” (Note: Metacortex also happens to be the company that Neo worked for in the movie, The Matrix)

The metacortex is the Web — our growing global network of information, people, sensors, and computing devices.

The Web is literally a new layer of the human brain that transcends any individual brain. It is a global brain that connects all our brains together. It is intelligent. It is perhaps humanity’s greatest invention.  It collectively senses, reacts, interprets, learns, thinks, and acts in ways that we as individuals can barely comprehend or predict, and this activity comprises an emerging global mind.

Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail and Friendfeed) calls this “the social brain” — with emphasis on the social networks and collective social interactions that are taking place. I think that while the metacortex includes the social Web, it transcends it — it’s collective knowledge and cognition include all of the activity taking place on the Internet.

Does the metacortex mirror the structure and process of the neocortex? What can we learn about the neocortex from the metacortex and vice versa? What are the functional areas or lobes of the metacortex? I look forward to your comments.

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 Tom Gruber, CTO of Siri, about the history, key ideas, and technical foundations of the product:

Nova Spivack: Can you give me a more precise definition of a Virtual Assistant?

Tom Gruber: A virtual personal assistant is a software system that

• Helps the user find or do something (focus on tasks, rather than information)
• Understands the user’s intent (interpreting language) and context (location, schedule, history)
• Works on the user’s behalf, orchestrating multiple services and information sources to help complete the task

In other words, an assistant helps me do things by understanding me and working for me. This may seem quite general, but it is a fundamental shift from the way the Internet works today. Portals, search engines, and web sites are helpful but they don’t do things for me – I have to use them as tools to do something, and I have to adapt to their ways of taking input.

Nova Spivack: Siri is hoping to kick-start the revival of the Virtual Assistant category, for the Web. This is an idea which has a rich history. What are some of the past examples that have influenced your thinking?

Tom Gruber: The idea of interacting with a computer via a conversational interface with an assistant has excited the imagination for some time. Apple’s famous Knowledge Navigator video offered a compelling vision, in which a talking head agent helped a professional deal with schedules and access information on the net. The late Michael Dertouzos, head of MIT’s Computer Science Lab, wrote convincingly about the assistant metaphor as the natural way to interact with computers in his book “The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us”. These accounts of the future say that you should be able to talk to your computer in your own words, saying what you want to do, with the computer talking back to ask clarifying questions and explain results. These are hallmarks of the Siri assistant. Some of the elements of these visions are beyond what Siri does, such as general reasoning about science in the Knowledge Navigator. Or self-awareness a la Singularity. But Siri is the real thing, using real AI technology, just made very practical on a small set of domains. The breakthrough is to bring this vision to a mainstream market, taking maximum advantage of the mobile context and internet service ecosystems.

Nova Spivack: Tell me about the CALO project, that Siri spun out from. (Disclosure: my company, Radar Networks, consulted to SRI in the early days on the CALO project, to provide assistance with Semantic Web development)

Tom Gruber: Siri has its roots in the DARPA CALO project (“Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes”) which was led by SRI. The goal of CALO was to develop AI technologies (dialog and natural language understanding,s understanding, machine learning, evidential and probabilistic reasoning, ontology and knowledge representation, planning, reasoning, service delegation) all integrated into a virtual assistant that helps people do things. It pushed the limits on machine learning and speech, and also showed the technical feasibility of a task-focused virtual assistant that uses knowledge of user context and multiple sources to help solve problems.

Siri is integrating, commercializing, scaling, and applying these technologies to a consumer-focused virtual assistant. Siri was under development for several years during and after the CALO project at SRI. It was designed as an independent architecture, tightly integrating the best ideas from CALO but free of the constraints of a national distributed research project. The Siri.com team has been evolving and hardening the technology since January 2008.

Nova Spivack: What are primary aspects of Siri that you would say are “novel”?

Tom Gruber: The demands of the consumer internet focus — instant usability and robust interaction with the evolving web — has driven us to come up with some new innovations:

• A conversational interface that combines the best of speech and semantic language understanding with an interactive dialog that helps guide people toward saying what they want to do and getting it done. The conversational interface allows for much more interactivity that one-shot search style interfaces, which aids usability and improves intent understanding. For example, if Siri didn’t quite hear what you said, or isn’t sure what you meant, it can ask for clarifying information. For example, it can prompt on ambiguity: did you mean pizza restaurants in Chicago or Chicago-style pizza places near you? It can also make reasonable guesses based on context. Walking around with the phone at lunchtime, if the speech interpretation comes back with something garbled about food you probably meant “places to eat near my current location”. If this assumption isn’t right, it is easy to correct in a conversation.
• Semantic auto-complete – a combination of the familiar “autocomplete” interface of search boxes with a semantic and linguistic model of what might be worth saying. The so-called “semantic completion” makes it possible to rapidly state complex requests (Italian restaurants in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco that have tables available tonight) with just a few clicks. It’s sort of like the power of faceted search a la Kayak, but packaged in a clever command line style interface that works in small form factor and low bandwidth environments.
• Service delegation – Siri is particularly deep in technology for operationalizing a user’s intent into computational form, dispatching to multiple, heterogeneous services, gathering and integrating results, and presenting them back to the user as a set of solutions to their request. In a restaurant selection task, for instance, Siri combines information from many different sources (local business directories, geospatial databases, restaurant guides, restaurant review sources, online reservation services, and the user’s own favorites) to show a set of candidates that meet the intent expressed in the user’s natural language request.

Nova Spivack: Why do you think Siri will succeed when other AI-inspired projects have failed to meet expectations?

Tom Gruber: In general my answer is that Siri is more focused. We can break this down into three areas of focus:

• Task focus. Siri is very focused on a bounded set of specific human tasks, like finding something to do, going out with friends, and getting around town. This task focus allows it to have a very rich model of its domain of competence, which makes everything more tractable from language understanding to reasoning to service invocation and results presentation
• Structured data focus. The kinds of tasks that Siri is particularly good at involve semistructured data, usually on tasks involving multiple criteria and drawing from multiple sources. For example, to help find a place to eat, user preferences for cuisine, price range, location, or even specific food items come into play. Combining results from multiple sources requires reasoning about domain entity identity and the relative capabilities of different information providers. These are hard problems of semantic information processing and integration that are difficult but feasible today using the latest AI technologies.
• Architecture focus. Siri is built from deep experience in integrating multiple advanced technologies into a platform designed expressly for virtual assistants. Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer was chief architect of the CALO project, and has applied a career of experience to design the platform of the Siri product. Leading the CALO project taught him a lot about what works and doesn’t when applying AI to build a virtual assistant. Adam and I also have rather unique experience in combining AI with intelligent interfaces and web-scale knowledge integration. The result is a “pure play” dedicated architecture for virtual assistants, integrating all the components of intent understanding, service delegation, and dialog flow management. We have avoided the need to solve general AI problems by concentrating on only what is needed for a virtual assistant, and have chosen to begin with a finite set of vertical domains serving mobile use cases.

Nova Spivack: Why did you design Siri primarily for mobile devices, rather than Web browsers in general?

Tom Gruber: Rather than trying to be like a search engine to all the world’s information, Siri is going after mobile use cases where deep models of context (place, time, personal history) and limited form factors magnify the power of an intelligent interface. The smaller the form factor, the more mobile the context, the more limited the bandwidth : the more it is important that the interface make intelligent use of the user’s attention and the resources at hand. In other words, “smaller needs to be smarter.” And the benefits of being offered just the right level of detail or being prompted with just the right questions can make the difference between task completion or failure. When you are on the go, you just don’t have time to wade through pages of links and disjoint interfaces, many of which are not suitable to mobile at all.

Nova Spivack: What language and platform is Siri written in?

Tom Gruber: Java, Javascript, and Objective C (for the iPhone)

Nova Spivack: What about the Semantic Web? Is Siri built with Semantic Web open-standards such as RDF and OWL, Sparql?

Tom Gruber: No, we connect to partners on the web using structured APIs, some of which do use the Semantic Web standards. A site that exposes RDF usually has an API that is easy to deal with, which makes our life easier. For instance, we use geonames.org as one of our geospatial information sources. It is a full-on Semantic Web endpoint, and that makes it easy to deal with. The more the API declares its data model, the more automated we can make our coupling to it.

Nova Spivack: Siri seems smart, at least about the kinds of tasks it was designed for. How is the knowledge represented in Siri – is it an ontology or something else?

Tom Gruber: Siri’s knowledge is represented in a unified modeling system that combines ontologies, inference networks, pattern matching agents, dictionaries, and dialog models. As much as possible we represent things declaratively (i.e., as data in models, not lines of code). This is a tried and true best practice for complex AI systems. This makes the whole system more robust and scalable, and the development process more agile. It also helps with reasoning and learning, since Siri can look at what it knows and think about similarities and generalizations at a semantic level.

Nova Spivack: Will Siri be part of the Semantic Web, or at least the open linked data Web (by making open API’s, sharing of linked data, RDF, available, etc.)?

Tom Gruber: Siri isn’t a source of data, so it doesn’t expose data using Semantic Web standards. In the Semantic Web ecosystem, it is doing something like the vision of a semantic desktop – an intelligent interface that knows about user needs and sources of information to meet those needs, and intermediates. The original Semantic Web article in Scientific American included use cases that an assistant would do (check calendars, look for things based on multiple structured criteria, route planning, etc.). The Semantic Web vision focused on exposing the structured data, but it assumes APIs that can do transactions on the data. For example, if a virtual assistant wants to schedule a dinner it needs more than the information about the free/busy schedules of participants, it needs API access to their calendars with appropriate credentials, ways of communicating with the participants via APIs to their email/sms/phone, and so forth. Siri is building on the ecosystem of APIs, which are better if they declare the meaning of the data in and out via ontologies. That is the original purpose of ontologies-as-specification that I promoted in the 1990s – to help specify how to interact with these agents via knowledge-level APIs.

Siri does, however, benefit greatly from standards for talking about space and time, identity (of people, places, and things), and authentication. As I called for in my Semantic Web talk in 2007, there is no reason we should be string matching on city names, business names, user names, etc.

All players near the user in the ecommerce value chain get better when the information that the users need can be unambiguously identified, compared, and combined. Legitimate service providers on the supply end of the value chain also benefit, because structured data is harder to scam than text. So if some service provider offers a multi-criteria decision making service, say, to help make a product purchase in some domain, it is much easier to do fraud detection when the product instances, features, prices, and transaction availability information are all structured data.

Nova Spivack: Siri appears to be able to handle requests in natural language. How good is the natural language processing (NLP) behind it? How have you made it better than other NLP?

Tom Gruber: Siri’s top line measure of success is task completion (not relevance). A subtask is intent recognition, and subtask of that is NLP. Speech is another element, which couples to NLP and adds its own issues. In this context, Siri’s NLP is “pretty darn good” — if the user is talking about something in Siri’s domains of competence, its intent understanding is right the vast majority of the time, even in the face of noise from speech, single finger typing, and bad habits from too much keywordese. All NLP is tuned for some class of natural language, and Siri’s is tuned for things that people might want to say when talking to a virtual assistant on their phone. We evaluate against a corpus, but I don’t know how it would compare to standard message and news corpuses using by the NLP research community.

Nova Spivack: Did you develop your own speech interface, or are you using third-party system for that? How good is it? Is it battle-tested?

Tom Gruber: We use third party speech systems, and are architected so we can swap them out and experiment. The one we are currently using has millions of users and continuously updates its models based on usage.

Nova Spivack: Will Siri be able to talk back to users at any point?

Tom Gruber: It could use speech synthesis for output, for the appropriate contexts. I have a long standing interest in this, as my early graduate work was in communication prosthesis. In the current mobile internet world, however, iPhone-sized screens and 3G networks make it possible to do so more much than read menu items over the phone. For the blind, embedded appliances, and other applications it would make sense to give Siri voice output.

Nova Spivack: Can you give me more examples of how the NLP in Siri works?

Tom Gruber: Sure, here’s an example, published in the Technology Review, that illustrates what’s going on in a typical dialogue with Siri. (Click link to view the table)

Nova Spivack: How personalized does Siri get – will it recommend different things to me depending on where I am when I ask, and/or what I’ve done in the past? Does it learn?

Tom Gruber: Siri does learn in simple ways today, and it will get more sophisticated with time. As you said, Siri is already personalized based on immediate context, conversational history, and personal information such as where you live. Siri doesn’t forget things from request to request, as do stateless systems like search engines. It always considers the user model along with the domain and task models when coming up with results. The evolution in learning comes as users have a history with Siri, which gives it a chance to make some generalizations about preferences. There is a natural progression with virtual assistants from doing exactly what they are asked, to making recommendations based on assumptions about intent and preference. That is the curve we will explore with experience.

Nova Spivack: How does Siri know what is in various external services – are you mining and doing extraction on their data, or is it all just real-time API calls?

Tom Gruber: For its current domains Siri uses dozens of APIs, and connects to them in both realtime access and batch data synchronization modes. Siri knows about the data because we (humans) explicitly model what is in those sources. With declarative representations of data and API capabilities, Siri can reason about the various capabilities of its sources at run time to figure out which combination would best serve the current user request. For sources that do not have nice APIs or expose data using standards like the Semantic Web, we can draw on a value chain of players that do extract structure by data mining and exposing APIs via scraping.

Nova Spivack: Thank you for the information, Siri might actually make me like the iPhone enough to start using one again.

Tom Gruber: Thank you, Nova, it’s a pleasure to discuss this with someone who really gets the technology and larger issues. I hope Siri does get you to use that iPhone again. But remember, Siri is just starting out and will sometimes say silly things. It’s easy to project intelligence onto an assistant, but Siri isn’t going to pass the Turing Test. It’s just a simpler, smarter way to do what you already want to do. It will be interesting to see how this space evolves, how people will come to understand what to expect from the little personal assistant in their pocket.

“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 universe, and whether or not the Web can ever be said to be conscious in its own right. Beware — this content may not be of interest to most of my readers. It’s certainly in the “wild speculation” category.

Will the Web Become Conscious?

As the realtime Web gets faster and richer, it will begin to appear to be more cohesive and collectively intelligent. It will begin to appear like an actual, unified Global Brain, rather than just a crowd. Instead of being just a collection of interacting parts we will be able to see it as a functioning whole — a kind of entity in its own right. We will also be able to see this collective “entitiness” emerge for subsets of the whole Web? For example will nations, organizations, markets, industries, enterprises, workgroups and teams start to seem more intelligent? The Web will get smarter and faster, at every level of collective cognition but will it ever actually become conscious?

Yes and no.

It will become collectively more intelligent, and the consciousnesses of individuals around the Web will be more connected and potentially synchronized. But the Web itself won’t actually have it’s own new consciousness, unique from the consciousnesses of the people who participate in it. Still it will seem more conscious than it was before, simply by virtue of the human consciousnesses within it being more connected and focused.

I don’t think the Web will actually develop or have its own meta-level consciousness however. It won’t evolve some new form of Web-scale consciousness that is totally separate from the individual consciousness of the people on the Web.  A Web-scale sentient entity that is unique and separate from the humans minds on the Web will never exist. That will never happen. Instead, the Web as a whole will evolve to better utilize the human consciousness that is already present within it — the consciousness that we human beings already have.

The Irreplaceable Role of Humans in the Web

As conscious entities, we humans play a unique and irreplaceable role in the realtime Web and the Global Brain.  We provide the only consciousness the Web will ever have. Machines may be able to sense and measure what is going on, and even make sense of it for us in ways that transcend the abilities of the individual human brain, but they won’t be able to be conscious of what is going on the way that we humans can be.

We human beings are the consciousness of the Web — that is our special role. No machine or set of machines can replicate consciousness, not even the entire Web as a single machine. However there is a distinction to be made between consciousness and intelligence.

Machines can certainly be made to be intelligent, and that applies even to the entire Web as a machine as well. The Web is getting more intelligent, and as this happens it is becoming our Global Brain. But it’s not becoming more conscious.  Rather, we humans are becoming more conscious of the Web and what is going on within it. Humans are becoming able to be more conscious of the Web, but the Web itself is not becoming conscious at all, let alone more conscious. This is a key point to keep in mind.

Until recently humans have been watching the Web in slow motion. We can only see small glimpses at a time. The individual human brain cannot comprehend the vast patterns that are taking place on the Web, and there are few software tools that can make sense of them for us either. It’s just too big and complex a system, and the patterns which comprise its collective thoughts — the thoughts of the Global Brain — are too spread out in time and space.

We humans are barely able to be lucidly conscious in our little nows — which are really just spans of a few square meters, and a few minutes, at a time — but the collectively intelligent processes and patterns out on the Web cover thousands of miles and can span days, weeks, months or even years. They just don’t fit in our little human nows. The solution is to find a way to visualize them so we can digest them in our little nows. That’s the only practical approach — unless someone figures out how to expand the individual human now.

Fortunately, there are several trends that are going help with this process. As the Web gets faster, processes that used to take too long for us to follow them will become short enough for individuals to watch them play out in reasonable timespans, without getting lost or overwhelmed. The collective thoughts of the Web are starting to happen fast enough for our human minds to see them emerge, change, and interact on our human timescale of minutes and hours. Instead of watching memes develop and spread on the Web as if in slow-motion, we are starting to see and measure them in our timescale, at our speed.

In addition as the Web gets more computationally powerful — computers and software will be able to help us see what is going on beyond the limits of our human nows — larger volumes of data changing over larger spans of time than we can grasp on our own. This too will help to compress and visualize patterns and processes that were previously beyond our comprehension in ways that we can make sense of as individual human observers with our small brains and short nows.

Both of these trends will enable individual human minds to comprehend larger and more complex processes and patterns within the Web. And as individuals become able to be conscious of larger and more complex patterns taking place within the Web, they will be able to react and adapt to those patterns in their own individual behavior. This feedback loop will give rise to increasingly intelligent collective adaptation and behavior. And thus the Web as a whole — the Global Brain that includes humans, machines, software, and all our infrastructure — will appear to become increasingly smart.

Humans drive this process by simply being conscious observers of the Web, and by making intelligent decisions, adding content and taking actions online. But we’re not the only ones. Software will also play a role in this — adding intelligence and content, but not consciousness, to the process.

How Important is Consciousness Anyway?

But how important is human consciousness to the Web, and the Global Brain? One might wonder whether human consciousness really matters in all this, or whether it’s enough just to have non-conscious but intelligent machines?

Would the Global Brain be different without humans there to witness it? If there were no humans in it, but just non-conscious artificially intelligent software that simply follows rules or uses statistics and algorithms — would the Global Brain be more or less conscious or intelligent?

This is actually an absurd question. Without humans there would not be a Web, let alone a Global Brain. But let’s just suspend that for a moment and ask the question in a different way. Suppose that at some time in the distant future, all humans die, but the Web remains. Would the Web still contain any consciousness on it’s own?

I think the answer is no. This ultimately goes back to John Searle’s concept of Qualia. In a nutshell, there is nothing on the Web, apart from humans, that is capable of experiencing qualia — the actual knowing of any experience. So there is nothing on the Web that is capable of being conscious, apart from the humans who participate in it. Without the humans, there could be no consciousness in or on the Web.

There  is a difference between being conscious of the qualia of something, and simply measuring data about something. Qualia is special — as strange and potentially hocus-pocus at that may sound. I just don’t believe qualia is something that can be synthesized in a machine or by any algorithm. Being conscious of the Web is not the same as simply measuring data flows. I believe there is a distinct quality of “knowing” or “being aware” that is the hallmark of actual consciousness and which simply cannot be synthesized in a computer.

From what I can tell, qualia is something unique to being sentient, in other words, aware. And awareness is something special as far as I can tell — I think it might be fundamental like space and time, not something we can create or synthesize, and not something emergent. Again this just my opinion — but I think it’s a defensible one.

The Unexplainableness of Consciousness

I’ve spent decades thinking about the question of consciousness, and whether machines can ever be conscious, and I have never found it plausible to make conscious machines.

Quite the contrary — the more I have examined this question, the more clear it has become to me that consciousness is special — it is something that simply cannot even be described, and literally cannot be found — yet it is undeniably taking place. Ontologically consciousness is similar to space and time — we cannot find space or time, we cannot isolate them or grasp their substance, yet they are undeniably taking place. Consciousness seems to be just like that. Unexplainable, yet undeniable.

I’m something of a mystic with regard to consciousness — but not in a blind way. I’ve come to this view only after really trying to avoid it — through very thorough and painstaking investigation from just about every perspective on it — neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, physics, cosmology, and religion and spirituality.

Consciousness appears finally to be something we just cannot explain, let alone synthesize, and I’d be willing to bet that it’s always going to be beyond our reach. In fact I have made such a bet at the Long Bets project: You can read more about this in my article, “Why Machines Will Never be Conscious.”

Given that I view consciousness as something primordial and beyond physics, from my perspective at least, I don’t think we can manufacture it. I also doubt it will simply magically emerge on the Web, apart from individual human minds.

Consciousness is Neither Emergent Nor Reducible.

But wait. Certainly there is a case to be made that if consciousness can emerge within the human brain, then why not within the Web? The human brain is essentially a more complex Web after all. Why is one kind of Web any more or less qualified to be conscious?

My present answer to this is that I don’t think consciousness ever emerges through some physical process — it’s never created or destroyed, and even when said to be present it’s not “there” like other kinds of things. It doesn’t appear as something, it has no form, shape, color, etc. It cannot be found or grasped at all. It is similar to space in these respects.

Space is never created or destroyed — at least as far as we can tell from within this universe. Similarly, consciousness is never created or destroyed as far as we can tell as conscious observers. That’s just how the universe is — it’s a mystery that is bigger than us. We’ll never be able to comprehend it fully from inside it. Consciousness seems to have the same ontological status as space. The difference is that while space is inert, incapable of observing or knowing, consciousness seems to have a quality of knowing that is quite unique.

My point is actually that the human brain is NOT special. I don’t actually think consciousness comes from the brain or is inside the brain, or running like some kind of software on the hardware of the brain.

If consciousness were merely some physical phenomenon that depended on the brain, then it would be no problem to synthesize it, not just for AI but for the Web as a whole as well. But that’s not the case, in my opinion.

I don’t think consciousness is a material thing, nor is it an emergent phenomena. I think it’s fundamental to the nature of the universe — like space and time — or perhaps even more fundamental than space and time. We can’t create it. We’ll probably never fully understand it. It just is there from the start. It’s the very basis of the entire phenomena of the universe, it’s not merely something that evolves and emerges within the universe. Indeed, I would venture to state that without consciousness — at least in primordial form — no universes would even be possible or would ever arise.

In my view, material things like the physical universe and the human body and brain, emerge from consciousness, rather than consciousness emerging from material things. Consciousness, whatever it is, is primordial and fundamental. Whether or not you reify it as a fundamental first-cause or ultimate thing, or you take the Buddhist view that it is also empty of any entity or nature and therefore not a thing, it is still at least totally primordial.

This isn’t just speculation — it’s something that can both be observed and is entirely logical as well. For example, if you really look closely at what you or anyone can possibly ever observe, it appears this is the only tenable answer we can find. Why? Because we cannot observe anything prior to being conscious ourselves — consciousness is necessary to be an observer. We can’t even ask such questions if we are not conscious in the first place. Consciousness is assumed, and must already be there, as soon as we even start looking for it.

Furthermore, the example of dreams proves that incredibly real virtual worlds, entire universes, can indeed appear and take place within the sphere of an individual dreaming consciousness — and they are indistinguishable (while they occur) from waking experience. Dreaming illustrates the power and scope of consciousness — it shows that it is not absurd to think that the our own so-called waking experience could be appearing like a dream within our own fields of consciousness. Waking experience, like dreaming, happens within the sphere of consciousness. It’s impossible to have waking experience without being conscious.

We have no evidence of there being anything beyond the sphere of consciousness and we cannot possibly observe anything without resorting to consciousness in the process to make the observation. There is no way to logically establish that there exists anything beyond or before the scope of consciousness. Anything we attempt to prove or observer is mediated by our own observing consciousness.

For this reason, as far as I or anyone can ever discern, it is reasonable to posit that each of our unique perspectives — each of our minds — contains the universe from one perspective. It’s similar to a hologram — where each piece of the picture contains the whole picture from a different angle. In the case of consciousness, each individual consciousness is one unique perspective on the universe. And the universe itself cannot be found apart from all these conscious perspectives on it. It’s not “out there” as some separate physical thing that these consciousnesses are simply watching from afar — it is literally a manifestation of these consciousnesses, there is no duality between observer and what is observed at the quantum level.

All the evidence points to consciousness being prior to everything else. There is in fact no evidence that indicates otherwise. As a result I don’t believe consciousness is emergent or reducible. I don’t think it is created or destroyed. And even when present it is not actually findable, because it is basically an axiom of the system we are in. It’s primordial and so we cannot sense it or detect it, other than with consciousness itself. There’s nothing more fundamental to break it down into, or to compare or contrast it against.

Consciousness and the Quantum Substrate

From what I can discern so far, I believe that human consciousness — actual sentience, not simulated sentience — is fundamentally related to the fabric of space-time. It is woven right into the quantum substrate of reality.

At that level of reality there is not clear distinction between mind and matter, it’s some kind of whole that we barely understand. While computers may be able to simulate aspects of this, they do not actually interact directly with the quantum substrate the way that human consciousness does.

This is a big difference between machine minds and human minds: Human consciousness is directly connected to the fundamental quantum nature of the universe, and quite probably plays a role in creating or at least conditioning observed reality. Computer programs — no matter how sophisticated — are not connected to the quantum substrate in the same way — they are not capable of being true quantum observers.

There is at least some evidence for my view of consciousness: On a quantum level, observation and measurement seem to have an impact on what is actually found to occur. The observer affects the experiment. All forms of observation eventually seem to require a human — or equivalently conscious — observer at some point in the process — there’s no escaping that. Without such an observer, the universe remains in an indeterminate quantum state. So it appears that human consciousness — or at least authentic actual consciousness whether human or not — is required to cause the quantum field to actually crystallize into particular events.

On the other hand, there is no evidence that computers can ever be conscious; no evidence that synthetic sentient observers can be created, and even if we created them, there would be no way to prove that their powers of observation were equivalent to our own. Any observations they made of them would ultimately be observed by us humans, and so we would always be the final conscious observers in the chain.

On a quantum level, our observation of our machines, would cascade downwards, causing their observations of reality to have an effect. Without our observing them, machines would not be able to actually affect the quantum level of reality. And indeed it would be difficult to try to prove otherwise, because a human observer is necessary to observe any such proof or system we can devise (and in fact, quantum observer effects have been shown even to propagate backwards in time from a later act of observation to an earlier experiment). So there’s just no way to take human consciousness out of the loop.

We cannot prove that human consciousness isn’t necessary for our universe to appear. We cannot prove that machines can function as independent quantum observers, separate from human observation, and we probably cannot devise any experiment or device which could prove that therefore. There’ s really no evidence to suggest that machines could synthesize this function — all the evidence in fact says otherwise. And this applies by extension to the Web as a whole, and thus to the Global Brain.

As a result, I think human consciousnesses play an absolutely crucial role in the universe, the  Web, and in any eventual Global Brain or form of collective intelligence. Our consciousness is the only actual authentic consciousness in the system. And it plays an important and necessary role at a quantum level in shaping reality through quantum level acts of observation.

By the way, it’s worth noting that consciousness is not exclusively the domain of human beings — animals are also conscious for example. But human beings are at least the most intelligent conscious things that we know of, so I’m limiting this discussion of the Global Brain to humans. In any case, there is no substitute for actual consciousness. It can’t be synthesized. It comes only from humans. At best it can perhaps be aimed, funneled or maybe amplified.

But that doesn’t mean that machine intelligence won’t play a very important enabling and catalyzing role in making the Global Brain smarter. There’s a difference between consciousness and intelligence. In fact, machine intelligence is critical to the Global Brain waking up — because it makes the vast complexity of the Global Brain (in both space and time) comprehensible, digestible, and accessible to the individual human consciousnesses that observe it.

Although humans posses consciousness, our minds are limited in scope — we simply cannot see or make sense of patterns that are above a certain level of scale or complexity in space and time. We need help with that — and that’s where computers enter the story, with their vast abilities to calculate, sort, collate, correlate, and organize masses of data.

Computers essentially increase the scope of human consciousness, by enabling us to observe things and do computations that are beyond the abilities of the individual human brain. It is by making the vast patterns within the complex whole — the entire Web –  more visible and understandable to the observers within it — the human consciousnesses within it — that the Global Brain actually becomes smarter, more reflexively-aware, and more collectively conscious.

By connecting individual human consciousnesses to the vast intelligence and knowledge of the growing global computing network, we will get the best of both: a Global Brain that gets increasingly collectively aware and intelligent.

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 is doing. By speeding up the Web, it will cause processes that used to take weeks or months to unfold online, to happen in days or even minutes. And this will bring these processes to the human-scale — to the scale of our human “now” — making it possible for us to be aware of larger collective processes than before. We have until now been watching the Web in slow motion. As it speeds up, we will begin to see and understand what’s taking place on the Web in a whole new way.

This process of of quickening is part of a larger trend which I and others call “Nowism.” You can read more of my thoughts about Nowism here. Nowism is an orientation that is gaining momentum and will help to shape this decade, and in particular, how the Web unfolds. It is the idea that the present-timeframe (“the now”) is getting more important, shorter and also more information-rich. As this happens our civilization is becoming more focused on the now, and less focused on past or the future. Simply keeping up with the present is becoming an all-consuming challenge: Both a threat and an opportunity.

The realtime Web –  what I call “The Stream”  (see “Welcome to the Stream”) — is changing the unit of now. It’s making it shorter. The now is the span of time which we have to be aware of to be effective our work and lives, and it is getting shorter. On a personal level the now is getting shorter and denser — more information and change is packed into shorter spans of time; a single minute on Twitter is overflowing with potentially relevant messages and links. In business as well, the now is getting shorter and denser — it used to be about the size of a fiscal quarter, then it became a month, then a week, then a day, and now it is probably about half a day in span. Soon it will be just a few hours.

To keep up with what is going on we have to check in with the world in at least half-day chunks. Important news breaks about once or twice a day. Trends on Twitter take about a day to develop too. So basically, you can afford to just check  the news and the real-time Web once or twice a day and still get by. But that’s going to change.  As the now gets shorter, we’ll have to check in more frequently to keep abreast of change. As the Stream picks up speed in the middle of this decade, to remain competitive will require near-constant monitoring — we will have to always be connected to, and watching, the real-time Web and our personal streams. Being offline at all will risk missing out on big important trends, threats and opportunities that emerge and develop within minutes or hours. But nobody is capable of tracking the Stream all 24/7 — we must at least take breaks to eat and sleep. And this is a problem.

Big Changes to the Web Coming Soon…

With Nowism comes a faster Web, and this will lead to big changes in how we do various activities on the Web:

• We will spend less time searching. Nowism pushes us to find better alternatives to search, or to eliminate search entirely, because people don’t have time to search anymore. We need tools that do the searching for us and that help with decision support so we don’t have to spend so much of our scarce time doing that. See my article on “Eliminating the Need for Search — Help Engines” for more about that.
• Monitoring (not searching) the real-time stream becomes more important. We need to stay constantly vigilant about what’s happening, what’s trending. We need to be alerted of the important stuff (to us), and we need a way to filter out what’s not important to us. Probably a filter based on influence of people and tweets, and/or time dynamics of memes will be necessary. Monitoring the real-time stream effectively is different from searching it. I see more value in real-time monitoring than realtime search — I haven’t seen any monitoring tools for Twitter that are smart enough to give me just the content I want yet. There’s a real business opportunity there.
• The return of agents. Intelligent agents are going to come back. To monitor the realtime Web effectively each of us will need online intelligent agents that can help us — because we don’t have time, and even if we did, there’s just too much information to sift through.
• Influence becomes more important than relevance. Advertisers and marketers will look for the most influential parties (individuals or groups) on Twitter and other social media to connect with and work through. But to do this there has to be an effective way to measure influence. One service that’s providing a solution for this (which I’ve angel invested in and advise) is Klout.com – they measure influence per person per topic. I think that’s a good start.
• Filtering content by influence. We also will need a way to find the most influential content. Influential content could be the content most RT’d or most RT’d by most influential people. It would be much less noisy to be able to see only the more influential tweets of people I follow. If a tweet gets RT’d a lot, or is RT’d by really influential people, then I want to see it. If not, then only if it’s really important (based on some rule). This will be the only way to cope with the information overload of the real-time Web and keep up with it effectively. I don’t know of anyone providing a service for this yet. It’s a business opportunity.
• Nowness as a measure of value of content. We will need a new form of ranking of results by “nowness” – how timely they are now. So for example, in real-time search engines we shouldn’t rank results merely by how recent they are, but also by how timely, influential, and “hot” they are now. See my article from years ago on “A Physics of Ideas” for more about that. Real-time search companies should think of themselves as real-time monitoring companies — that’s what they are really going to be used for in the end. Only the real-time search ventures that think of themselves this way are going to survive the conceptual paradigm shift that the realtime Web is bringing about. In a realtime context, search is actually too late — once something has happened in the past it really is not that important anymore –what matters is current awareness: discovering the trends NOW. To do that one has to analyze the present, and the very recent past, much more than searching the longer term past. The focus has to be on real-time or near-real-time analytics, statistical analysis, topic and trend detection, prediction, filtering and alerting. Not search.
• New ways to understand and navigate the now. We will need a way to visualize and navigate the now. I’m helping to incubate a stealth startup venture, Live Matrix, that is working on that. It hasn’t launched yet. It’s cool stuff. More on that in the future when they launch.
• New tools for browsing the Stream. New tools will emerge for making the realtime Web more compelling and smarter. I’m working on incubating some new stealth startups in this area as well. They’re very early-stage so can’t say more about them yet.
• The merger of semantics with the realtime Web. We need to make the realtime Web semantic — as well as the rest of the Web — in order to make it easier for software to make sense of it for us. This is the best approach to increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of content we have to look at whether searching or monitoring stuff. The Semantic Web standars of the W3C are key to this. I’ve written a long manifesto on this in “Minding The Planet: The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web” if you’re really interested in that topic.

Faster Leads to Smarter

As the realtime web unfolds and speeds up, I think it will also have a big impact on what some people call “The Global Brain.” The Global Brain has always existed, but in recent times it has been experiencing a series of major upgrades — particularly around how connected, affordable, accessible and fast it is. First we got phone and faxes, then the Internet, the PC and the Web, and now the real-time Web and the Semantic Web. All of these recent changes are making the Global Brain faster, more richly interconnected. And this makes it smarter. For more about my thoughts on the Global Brain, see these two talks:

• My detailed History and Future of the Global Brain given at the Singularity Summit.
• A talk on the emerging Global Brain and human-machine cybernetic superorganism, with specific focus on what it means for media companies, from the GRID Conference.

What’s most interesting to me is that as the rate of communication and messaging on the Web approaches near-real time, we may see a kind of phase change take place – a much smarter Global Brain will sort of begin to appear out of the chaos. In other words, the speed of collective thinking is as important to the complexity or sophistication of collective thinking, in making the Global Brain significantly more intelligent. In other words, I’m proposing that there is a sort of critical speed of collective thinking, before which the Global Brain seems like just a crowd of actors chaotically flocking around memes, and after which the Global Brain makes big leaps — instead of seeming like a chaotic crowd, it starts to look more like an organized group around certain activitities — it is able to respond to change faster, and optimize and even do things collectively more productively than a random crowd could.

This is kind of like film, or animation. When you watch a movie or animation you are really watching a rapid series of frames. This gives the illusion of there being cohesive, continuous characters, things and worlds in the movie — but really they aren’t there at all, it’s just an illusion — our brains put these scenes together and start to recognize and follow higher order patterns. A certain shape appears to maintain itself and move around relative to other shapes, and we name it with a certain label — but there isn’t really something there, let alone something moving or interacting — there are just frames flicking by rapidly . It turns out that after a critical frame rate (around 20 to 60 frames per second) the human brain stops seeing individual frames and starts seeing a continuous movie. When you start flipping pages fast enough it appears to be a coherent animation and then we start seeing things “moving within the sequence” of frames. In the same way, as the unit of time of (aka the speed) of the real-time Web increases, its behavior will start to seem more continuous and smarter — we won’t see separate chunks of time or messages, we’ll see intelligent continuous collective thinking and adaptation processes.

In other words, as the Web gets faster, we’ll start to see processes emerge within it that appear to be cohesive intelligent collective entities in their own right. There won’t really be any actual entities there that we can isolate, but when we watch the patterns on the Web it will appear as if such entities are there. This is basically what is happening at every level of scale — even in the real world. There really isn’t anything there that we can find — everything is divisible down to the quantum level and probably beyond — but over time our brains seem to recognize and label patterns as discrete “things.” This is what will happen across the Web as well. For example, a certain meme (such as a fad or a movement) may become a “thing” in it’s own right, a kind of entity that seemingly takes on a life of its own and seems to be doing something. Similarly certain groups or social networks or activities they engage in may seem to be intelligent entities in their own rights.

This is an illusion in that there really are no entities there, they are just collections of parts that themselves can be broken down into more parts, and no final entities can be found. However, nonethless, they will seem like intelligent entities when not analyzed in detail. In addition, the behavior of these chaotic systems may resist reduction — they may not even be understandable and their behavior may not be predictable through a purely reductionist approach — it may be that they react to their own internal state and their environments virtually in real-time, making it difficult to take a top-down or bottom-up view of what they are doing. In a realtime world, change happens in every direction.

As the Web gets faster, the patterns that are taking place across it will start to become more animated. Big processes that used to take months or years to happen will happen in minutes or hours. As this comes about we will begin to see larger patterns than before, and they will start to make more sense to us — they will emerge out of the mists of time so to speak, and become visible to us on our human timescale — the timescale of our human-level “now. As a result, we will become more aware of higher order dynamics taking place on the real-time Web, and we will begin to participate in and adapt to those dynamics, making those dynamics in turn even smarter. (For more on my thoughts about how the Global Brain gets smarter, see:  “How to Build the Global Mind.”)

See Part II: “Will The Web Become Conscious?” if you want to dig further into the thorny philosophical and scientific issues that this brings up…

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 more ways to get people to search, or ways to make existing search experiences better, I am starting to think about how to reduce or  eliminate the need to search — by replacing it with something better.

People don’t search because they like to. They search because there is something else they are trying to accomplish. So search is in fact really just an inconvenience — a means-to-an-end that we have to struggle through to do in order to get to what we actually really want to accomplish. Search is “in the way” between intention and action. It’s an intermediary stepping stone. And perhaps there’s a better way to get to where we want to go than searching.

Searching is a boring and menial activity. Think about it. We have to cleverly invent and try pseudo-natural-language queries that don’t really express what we mean. We try many different queries until we get results that approximate what we’re looking for. We click on a bunch of results and check them out. Then we search some more. And then some more clicking. Then more searching. And we never know whether we’ve been comprehensive, or have even entered the best query, or looked at all the things we should have looked at to be thorough. It’s extremely hit or miss. And takes up a lot of time and energy. There must be a better way! And there is.

Instead of making search more bloated and more of a focus, the goal should really be get search out of the way.  To minimize the need to search, and to make any search that is necessary as productive as possible. The goal should be to get consumers to what they really want with the least amount of searching and the least amount of effort, with the greatest amount of confidence that the results are accurate and comprehensive. To satisfy these constraints one must NOT simply build a slightly better search engine!

Instead, I think there’s something else we need to be building entirely. I don’t know what to call it yet. It’s not a search engine. So what is it?

Bing’s term “decision engine” is pretty good, pretty close to it. But what they’ve actually released so far still looks and feels a lot like a search engine. But at least it’s pushing the envelope beyond what Google has done with search. And this is good for competition and for consumers. Bing is heading in the right direction by leveraging natural language, semantics, and structured data. But there’s still a long way to go to really move the needle significantly beyond Google to be able to win dominant market share.

For the last decade the search wars have been fought in battles around index size, keyword search relevancy, and ad targeting — But I think the new battle is going to be fought around semantic understanding, intelligent answers, personal assistance, and commerce affiliate fees. What’s coming next after search engines are things that function more like assistants and brokers.

Wolfram Alpha is an example of one approach to this trend. The folks at Wolfram Alpha call their system a “computational knowledge engine” because they use a knowledge base to compute and synthesize answers to various questions. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, going through various data, computing and comparing, and then synthesizes a concise answer.

There are also other approaches to getting or generating answers for people — for example, by doing what Aardvark does: referring people to experts who can answer their questions or help them. Expert referral, or expertise search, helps reduce the need for networking and makes networking more efficient. It also reduces the need for searching online — instead of searching for an answer, just ask an expert.

There’s also the semantic search approach — perhaps exemplified by my own Twine “T2″ project — which basically aims to improve the precision of search by helping you get to the right results faster, with less irrelevant noise. Other consumer facing semantic search projects of interest are Goby and Powerset (now part of Bing).

Still another approach is that of Siri, which is making an intelligent “task completion assistant” that helps you search for and accomplish things like “book a romantic dinner and a movie tonight.” In some ways Siri is a “do engine” not a “search engine.” Siri uses artificial intelligence to help you do things more productively. This is quite needed and will potentially be quite useful, especially on mobile devices.

All of these approaches and projects are promising. But I think the next frontier — the thing that is beyond search and removes the need for search is still a bit different — it is going to combine elements of all of the above approaches, with something new.

For a lack of a better term, I call this a “help engine.” A help engine proactively helps you with various kinds of needs, decisions, tasks, or goals you want to accomplish. And it does this by helping with an increasingly common and vexing problem: choice overload.

The biggest problem is that we have too many choices, and the number of choices keeps increasing exponentially. The Web and globalization have increased the number of choices that are within range for all of us, but the result has been overload. To make a good, well-researched, confident choice now requires a lot of investigation, comparisons, and thinking. It’s just becoming too much work.

For example, choosing a location for an event, or planning a trip itinerary, or choosing what medicine to take, deciding what product to buy, who to hire, what company to work for, what stock to invest in, what website to read about some topic. These kinds of activities require a lot of research, evaluations of choices, comparisons, testing, and thinking. A lot of clicking. And they also happen to be some of the most monetizable activities for search engines. Existing search engines like Google that make money from getting you to click on their pages as much as possible have no financial incentive to solve this problem — if they actually worked so well that consumers clicked less they would make less money.

I think the solution to what’s after search — the “next Google” so to speak — will come from outside the traditional search engine companies. Or at least it will be an upstart project within one of them that surprises everyone and doesn’t come from the main search teams within them. It’s really such a new direction from traditional search and will require some real thinking outside of the box.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last month or two. It’s fascinating. What if there was a better way to help consumers with the activities they are trying to accomplish than search? If it existed it could actually replace search. It’s a Google-sized opportunity, and one which I don’t think Google is going to solve.

Search engines cause choice overload. That wasn’t the goal, but it is what has happened over time due to the growth of the Web and the explosion of choices that are visible, available, and accessible to us via the Web.

What we need now is not a search engine — it’s something that solves the problem created by search engines. For this reason, the next Google probably won’t be Google or a search engine at all.

I’m not advocating for artificial intelligence or anything that tries to replicate human reasoning, human understanding, or human knowledge. I’m actually thinking about something simpler. I think that it’s possible to use computers to provide consumers with extremely good, automated decision-support over the Web and the kinds of activities they engage in. Search engines are almost the most primitive form of decision support imaginable. I think we can do a lot better. And we have to.

People use search engines as a form of decision-support, because they don’t have a better alternative. And there are many places where decision support and help are needed: Shopping, travel, health, careers, personal finance, home improvement, and even across entertainment and lifestyle categories.

What if there was a way to provide this kind of personal decision-support — this kind of help — with an entirely different user experience than search engines provide today? I think there is. And I’ve got some specific thoughts about this, but it’s too early to explain them; they’re still forming.

I keep finding myself thinking about this topic, and arriving at big insights in the process. All of the different things I’ve worked on in the past seem to connect to this idea in interesting ways. Perhaps it’s going to be one of the main themes I’ll be working on and thinking about for this coming decade.

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.