From what I understand, the essence of Sergey’s approach is a new form of computer reasoning that implements “non-computational” networks of logical operations to solve problems.

It is “non-computational” in the sense that it is not an expert system or traditional computer program — rather it is a network of simple operators that compute locally and interact with one another, to emergently arrive at results, reflected by an overall state of the system at the end of the process. This approach reminds me of “connectionist” approaches to AI, such as neural networks and cellular automata.

Sergey believes that his approach could be an important step towards making truly humanlike artificial intelligence in the future. His point is that the brain is a non-computational system, and might in fact use some of these principles.

Sergey calls his approach “Artificial Consciousness,” but I don’t think the word “consciousness” adds value here – and it may even distract from the core idea. But, for the moment, let’s not argue about terminology — his theory is very interesting.

Sergey states that he has used this approach, to solve every logic problem in Raymond Smullyan’s book, Lady and the Tiger. For more info, read Sergey’s overview of his theory. You can read some more of his writings on this theory, here.

You can also view a working simulation of the system in operation, here.

I can’t explain it very well, so here is Sergey’s explanation to me, from our correspondence (please note, he is not a native English speaker, so I have added some corrections to his letter to improve readability):

1.

I consider the present version of system, which only solves logical tasks, to not be a truly “intelligent” system. This system is only a starting point for my investigations. This system only looks like it is intelligent because it is solving tasks that are hard for people. The idea for how to solve logical problems in this way came to me accidentally by thinking about the book, Lady and the Tiger, by Raymond Smullyan. In my classification of AI, a system for solving logical puzzles appears to be a kind of low complexity system (according my theory). This present version of the system is just a step along the way towards more sophisticated AI.

2.

Despite my low valuation of systems for logical solving, for practical use at least, such systems can be amusing for people. And such system can be the starting point to thinking about more sophisticated “non-computational” systems. The theory of such systems is well developed for computational case and such system is called SAT system (Boolean satisfiability problem).

The essence of the problem is as follows. Suppose we have a logical expression. (In our case the logical expression reflects the statement of a puzzle). And we consider that logical expression has value “TRUE” (in our case the formulation of the puzzle is true). Then we shall find out logical arguments of this expression which satisfy this expression (to make this expression to be “TRUE”). This procedure is so called NP-complete. In the worst case, this requires full enumeration of all possible arguments. The SAT approach aims to reduce the probable enumerations. The methods of SAT is well developed. But I don’t know about this at the beginning of my work. Moreover, from the beginning I started to create a non-computational approach.

3.

My idea was very simple. Assume we have a logical function , “AND,” with two arguments. This function will have output value “TRUE” only in case where both of its arguments are “TRUE”. So if we know the value of the output of function, we can predict (not in any cases) the value of its inputs.

The formulation of the puzzle is expressed as a logical expression. The expression is represented in a form of a tree (mathematical tree). This tree you can see at video in my website. The nodes of the tree are logical functions (AND, OR and some more types). These nodes are represented as balls in the video. Each ball has one output link and several input links. The state of the function can be TRUE (red ball), FALSE (blue ball) and UNKNOWN (grey ball). From the beginning the logical tree has some nodes with pre-determined initial values (according to the formulation of the puzzle). These values are reassigned not only at the top or the bottom of the tree, but also in the middle of it.

After the start of the system,  each ball (each of the logical functions, i.e. each node) can fill states of the adjacent nodes. And each of the balls begins to continuously correct its state depending on the states of the nearby balls. For example, if one of the balls bears function AND with three inputs (thee arguments) and the upper ball sends to this ball information to be a “TRUE” then this ball will assign value “TRUE” at the each of its three inputs. In such a way different kinds of information will be propogated through the tree until a steady state is reached.

This information can change until steady state, asynchronously and even without clocking (this is not proved by me). During the theory about NP-completeness, solving can’t be reached unconditionally (like solving in the linear or differential equations). After some time, the system reaches an unresolvable state and it would need some more iterations to reach the complete solution. The system can be knocked out from each of these unresolvable states by assuming a hypothesis on one of the unresolved balls. The system can reach a global contradiction state or it can reach a global solution. If system doesn’t reach global solution or global contradiction state we must add a next hypothesis on the one of the next balls. In case of contradiction state we must change one of the hypotheses (typically the last hypothesis).

So the system can reach the solution (or set of the solutions) during the iterations between the assignment of hypotheses. This solving can be achieved without explicit algorithm and it can be achieved on non-computational structure, thousands or million time faster than in the computational devices.

4.

These results appear to be an unusual and promising for the AI domain. The importance of these results is in the demonstration of possibilities of non-computational solving of complicated tasks. I hope this system can attract attention of people to develop non-computational cognitive system millions times more powerful than human brain.

But unfortunately this kind of system is not yet a true AI system. Below is some explanations of why.

5.

A full AI system can’t be based on traditional (simple) logical basis. The system represented in our website can solve some kinds of logical tasks. But it can’t discus with humans about these tasks. It can’t explain the solving of these tasks. It can’t (and never could in future) understand natural written text. And it couldn’t do most of the human brain’s functions. One of the most fundamental reasons is that a network of logical functions (as I represent it) could only solve logical tasks, and it can’t grow by its own reasoning. There are many reasons to construct completely another kind of AI system based on different principles. But creating of more complicated system would be hard without understanding principles and problems of more simple system. Logical systems, such as mine, can be a starting point of the way to more powerful systems that apply my non-computational approach.

6.

I came to idea that a really powerful system must be based on the idea of mathematical sets. I found a way to create a network based on sets that can grow, and how such a network can solve different tasks. The range of these tasks is much greater than only solving of mathematical puzzles. I am working on this presently.

7.

My idea for a the chain of model tasks is not an engine of the system but it is a method of research. This  idea is very close to the statement of philosopher Bertrand Russell:

“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it”.

So that is my approach. For example, I made an expression of the idea of logical functions without logical notions. And I found unusual ideas for my novel system in this way.

There is another example of my principle. Assume we take a simplest question, so simple that decision of this question would be almost inevitable. Then if the decision would have high quality, the principles of this decision can be applied to a next but more complicated question. So moving from simple task to more complicated we can develop our theory.

I hope Sergey’s 20 years of thinking in this direction will prove interesting, and perhaps even fruitful, for the field of artificial intelligence. It does appear to me to be a novel and potentially promising vein of innovation.

Best of luck to Sergey and his collaborators. I’m always happy to see really original thinking in the field of AI.

In fact, I didn’t want to attend Oberlin. It was my absolute last choice; I was forced to apply by my mother. She went to Oberlin and loved it. She said she knew me better than anyone and knew for sure that Oberlin was where I belonged.

But from my perspective, there was no way I was going from Boston to some tiny school in the midwest with no city, no ocean, no tech community, no anything! No frikkin way. I wanted to go to Brown, or NYU, or somewhere “cool” or at least “big.”

Never mind the fact that Oberlin was one of the most intellectually intense, creative, free thinking liberal arts colleges in the country. Never mind that Oberlin was the first college to admit women and to not discriminate against people of color, and never mind that it had one of the top conservatories of music in the world, or that it has long had one of the highest percentages of graduates to go onto get PhDs.

Never mind all of that. My mother went there, and it was in Ohio. And it wasn’t Brown University. Those three facts were enough to convince me I didn’t belong there.

I procrastinated until I had sent out all my other applications. But my mother would not leave me alone. So, at the last minute, one evening, in a very rebellious mood, I filled out my Oberlin application in a way that I thought would GUARANTEE that they would not admit me.

Here is the essay:

Nova Spivack – Oberlin Essay

I wasn’t going to take my mother’s advice, no matter what. I did my best to write an essay that was the very opposite of what a college application essay should be. It was not serious, well reasoned, carefully written, or intellectually brilliant, and certainly did not demonstrate my desire or qualifications to attend Oberlin. In fact, if anything, I was hoping that Oberlin’s admission staff would read it and cross me right off their list.

But fate or destiny had other plans for me.

Brown University lost my application (I received a belated apology from their admissions department months later).

And to make matters worse, much to my dismay, Oberlin loved my essay.

They called me and told me it was one of the most creative essays they had ever received. They were convinced I really wanted to attend and that my essay was actually a serious attempt to get admitted.

They didn’t believe me when I said that no, in fact, I really didn’t want to go there and that it was my last choice and that I only applied because my mother forced me.

Nothing I said would convince them otherwise. They were sure I was playing an elaborate game with them. They were sure I really wanted to attend, and the more I denied it, the more they thought I was playing with them.

Their admissions director said I was exactly the kind of out-of-the-box thinker they look for. They called again. I said no. So they wrote, they spoke to my mother, and they even offered me a very generous scholarship. It was by far the best offer I got from any college. Ironically, in the end, I just could not say no.

It just goes to show you, everyone wants whomever doesn’t want them. Even colleges.

But on hindsight it turned out that my mother was right about me (as mothers usually are when it comes to their children). Oberlin was the best college I could have possibly have gone to. It was the perfect petri dish for an interdisciplinary, intensely curious, anti-authoritarian, free-thinking creative person like myself.

And the fact that there was no city to speak of and nothing at all to do off-campus (you could barely even find coffee off-campus when I attended) contributed to the most active, vibrant, non-boring on-campus community imaginable.

It was an absolute hotbed of thinking, activism, creativity, music, literature, art, science, philosophy, and basically just about everything but sports.

I tried my best to avoid it, and when I applied I tried to disqualify myself, but there was no escaping it. And it turned out that it really was the best place for me in the end; it was where I belonged.

I loved it. Every quirky idealistic isolated ivory tower dreamy minute of it.

Sometimes life works that way. What’s best for you is sometimes the opposite of what you think or want. And sometimes, when you are stubbornly certain that you know what’s best for you — just don’t listen to yourself, listen to your mother.

First of all, through all the different channels I use, I now receive approximately 13,000 messages a day. I don’t think I am an extreme case. In fact, anyone who uses Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, email, RSS, and a few Web apps, is probably in the same boat.

Of these, email is no longer the largest stream, but it’s still the most important. However, of 112 email messages received on that day, 46 (41%) were “notifications” from Web apps and Web sites, and these were a lot less important than the remaining messages that were actual communication of one form or another.

The largest streams are Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These streams are comprised of public messages posted by people and sources I follow. In these streams, based on a cursory analysis, it appears messages spool in at a rate that varies on the low side from 1 message every 2 minutes on average (LinkedIn) up to 2 messages per minute on average (Twitter for my personal account where I follow 525 people).

The volume of messages pouring through my social streams is impossible to keep up with. It’s becoming a personal firehose. So, like most people, I have no choice but to ignore 99.99% of them.

However, there are some needles in the haystack that I really would like to find. To solve for that, I use Bottlenose as my dashboard – it surfaces the social messages I really need to pay attention to. It helps me extract more value from my social streams. Fewer calories, more protein.  (Disclosure: I’m the CEO of Bottlenose).

I really need something to make sense of all the messages I’m getting. You probably do too. And in with the exponential growth of message volume across all streams, everyone’s going to need this within a year or two. Not just professionals and power-users, but even everyday consumers. In fact, many regular people are already overwhelmed.

Today, while we’re in beta testing, Bottlenose only pulls in Twitter and Facebook. However, where we’re heading is to include ALL the types of streams you see in this diagram above, making Bottlenose a truly “universal dashboard” for the era of the Stream.

I would be very curious to hear what your messaging looks like and if you’re seeing similar levels of overload.

Here’s the raw data for a typical day:

Notes
 *  Estimated average based on counting; does not include comments on messages
 ** Estimated average based on counting

In Part I, The Message is the Medium, I explored the shift in focus on the Web from documents to messages.

In Part II, Drowning in the Stream, we dove deep into some of the key challenges the Stream brings with it.

Here in Part III, we will discuss new challenges and solutions for keeping up with streams as they become increasingly noisy and fast-moving.

Getting Attention in Streams

Today if you post a message to Twitter, you have a very small chance of that message getting attention. What’s the solution?

You can do social SEO and try to come up with better, more attention-grabbing, search engine attracting, headlines. You can try to schedule your posts to appear at optimal times of day. You can even try posting the same thing many times a day to increase the chances of it being seen.

This last tactic is called “Repeat Posting” and it’s soon going to be clogging up all our streams with duplicate messages. Why am I so sure this is going to happen? Because we are in an arms race for attention. In a room where everyone is talking, everyone starts talking louder, and soon everyone is shouting.

Today when  you post a message to Twitter, the chances of getting anyone’s attention are low and they are getting lower.  If you have a lot of followers, the chances are a little better that at least some of them may be looking at their stream at precisely the time you post. But still, even with a lot of followers, the odds are that most of your followers probably won’t be online at that precise moment you post something, and so they’ll miss it.

Scheduled Posting

But it turns out there are optimal times of day to post, when more of your followers are likely to be looking at their streams. A new category of apps, typified by Buffer, has emerged to help you schedule your Tweets to post at such optimal times.

Using apps like Buffer, you can get more attention to your Tweets, but this is only a temporary solution. Because the exponential growth of the Stream means that soon even posting a message at an optimal time will not be enough to get it in front of everyone who should see it.

Repeat Posting

To really get noticed, above the noise, you need your message to be available at more than one optimal time, for example many times a day, or even every hour.

To achieve this, instead of posting a message once at the optimal time per day, we may soon see utilities that automatically post the same message many times a day – maybe every hour – perhaps with slightly different wording of headlines, to increase the chances that people will see them. I call this “repeat posting” or “message rotation.”

Repeat posting tools may get so sophisticated that they will A/B test different headlines and wordings and times of day to see what gets the best clickthroughs and then optimize for those. These apps may even intelligently rotate a set of messages over several days, repeating them optimally until they squeeze out every drop of potential attention and traffic, much like ad servers and ad networks rotate ads today.

But here’s the thing — as soon as anyone starts manually or automatically using repeat posting tactics, it will create an arms race – others will notice it, and compete for attention by doing the same thing. Soon everyone will have to post repeatedly to simply get noticed above the noise of all the other repeat posts.

This is exactly what happens when you are speaking in a crowded room. In a room full of people who are talking at once, some people start talking louder. Soon everyone is shouting and losing their voice at the same time.

This problem of everyone shouting at once is what is soon going to happen on Twitter and Facebook and other social networks. It’s already happening in some cases – more people are posting the same message more than once a day to get it noticed.

It’s inevitable that repeat posting behavior will increase, and when everyone starts doing it, our channels will become totally clogged with redundancy and noise. They will become unusable.

What’s the solution to this problem?

What to Do About Repeat Posting

One thing that is not the solution is to somehow create rules against repeat posting. That won’t work.

Another solution that won’t work is to attempt to detect and de-dupe repeats that occur. It’s hard to do this, and easy to create repeat posts that have different text and different links, to evade detection.

Another solution might be to recognize that repeat posting is inevitable, but to make the process smarter: Whenever a repeat posting happens, delete the previous repeat post. So at any given time the message only appears once in the stream. At least this prevents people from seeing the same thing many times at once in a stream. But it still doesn’t solve the problem of people seeing messages come by that they’ve seen already.

A better solution is to create a new consumption experience for keeping up with streams, where relevant messages are actually surfaced to users, instead of simply falling below the fold and getting buried forever. This would help to ensure that people would see the messages that were intended for them, and that they really wanted to see.

If this worked well enough, there would be less reason to do scheduled posting, let alone repeat posting. You could post a message once, and there would be much better chance of it being seen by your audience.

At Bottlenose, we’re working on exactly this issue in a number of ways. First of all, the app computes rich semantic metadata for messages in streams automatically, which makes it possible to filter them in many ways.

Bottlenose also computes the relevance of every message to every user, which enables ranking and sorting by relevancy, and the app provides smart automated assistants that can help to find and suggest relevant messages to users.

We’re only at the beginning of this and these features are still in early beta, but already we’re seeing significant productivity gains.

Fast-Moving Streams

As message volume increases exponentially in streams, our streams are going to not just going to be noisier, they are going to move faster. When we look at any stream there will be more updates per minute – more new messages scrolling in – and this will further reduce the chances of any message getting noticed.

Streams will begin to update so often they will literally move all the time. But how do you read, let alone keep up with, something that’s always moving?

Today, if you follow a Twitter stream for a breaking news story, such as a natural disaster like the Tsunami in Japan, or the death of Steve Jobs, you can see messages scrolling in, in real-time every second.

In fact, when Steve Jobs died, Twitter hit a record peak of around 50,000 Tweets per minute. If you were following that topic on Twitter at that time, the number of new messages pouring was impossible to keep up with.

Twitter has put together a nice infographic showing the highest Tweets Per Second events of 2011.

During such breaking news events, if you are looking at a stream for the topic, there is not even time to read a message before it has scrolled below the fold and been replaced by a bunch of more recent messages. The stream moves too fast to even read it.

But this doesn’t just happen during breaking news events. If you simply follow a lot of people and news sources, you will see that you start getting a lot of new messages every few minutes.

In fact, the more people and news sources, saved searches, and lists that you follow, the higher the chances are that at any given moment there are going to be many new messages for you.

Even if you just follow a few hundred people, the chances are pretty high that you are getting a number of new messages in Twitter and Facebook every minute. That’s way more messages than you get in email.

And even if you don’t follow a lot of people and news sources – even if you diligently prune your network, unfollow people, and screen out streams you don’t want, the mere exponential growth of message volume in coming years is soon going to catch up with you. Your streams are going to start moving faster.

But are there any ways to make it easier to keep up with these “whitewater streams?”

Scrolling is Not the Answer

One option is to just make people scroll. Since the 1990’s UX designers have been debating the issue of scrolling. Scrolling works, but it doesn’t work well when the scrolling is endless, or nearly endless. The longer the page, the lower percentage of users will scroll all the way down.

This becomes especially problematic if users are asked to scroll in long pages – for example infinite streams of messages going back from the present to the past (like Twitter, above). The more messages in the stream, the less attention those messages that are lower in the stream, below the fold, will get.

But that’s just the beginning of the problem. When a stream is not only long, but it’s also moving and changing all the time, it becomes much less productive to scroll. As you scroll down new stuff is coming in above you, so then you have to scroll up again, and then down again. It’s very confusing.

In long streams that are also changing constantly it is likely that engagement statistics will be very different than for scrolling down static pages. I think it’s likely engagement will be much lower, the farther down such dynamic streams one goes.

Pausing the Scroll is Not the Answer

Some apps handle this problem of streams moving out from under you by pausing auto-scrolling as you read – they simply notify you that there are new messages above whatever you are looking at. You can then click to expand the stream above and see the new messages. Effectively they make dynamic streams behave as if they are not dynamic, until you are ready to see the updates.

This at least enables you to read without the stream moving out from under you. It’s less disorienting that way. But in fast moving streams where there are constantly new updates coming in, you have to click on the “new posts above” notification frequently, and it gets tedious.

For example, here is Twitter, on a search for Instagram, a while after the news of their acquisition by Facebook. After waiting only a few seconds, there are 20 new tweets already. If you click the bar that says “20 new Tweets” they expand. But by the time you’ve done that and started reading them, there are 20 more.

Simply clicking to read “20 new tweets” again and again is tedious. And furthermore, it doesn’t really help users cope with the overwhelming number of messages and change in busy streams.

The problem here is that streams are starting to move faster than we can read, even faster than we can click. How do you keep up with this kind of change?

Tickers and Slideshows Are Helpful

Another possible solution to the problem of keeping up with moving streams is to make the streams become like news tickers, constantly updating and crawling by as new stuff comes in. Instead of trying to hide the movement of the stream, make it into a feature.

Some friends and I have tested this idea out in an iPad app we built for this purpose called StreamGlider. You can download StreamGlider and try it out for yourself.

StreamGlider shows streams in several different ways — including a ticker mode and a slideshow mode where streams advance on their own as new messages arrive.

The Power of Visualization

Another approach to keeping up with fast moving streams is to use visualization, like we’re doing in Bottlenose, with our Sonar feature. By visualizing what is going on in a stream you can provide a user with instant understanding of what is in the stream and what is important and potentially interesting to them, without requiring them to scroll, skim or read everything first.

Sonar reads all the messages in any stream, applies natural language and semantic analysis to them, detects and measures emerging topics, and then visualizes them in realtime as the stream changes.

It shows you what is going on in the stream – in that pile of messages you don’t have time to scroll through and read. As more messages come in, Sonar updates in realtime to show you what’s new.

You can click on any trend in Sonar that interests you, to quickly zoom into just the messages that relate.

The beauty of this approach is that it avoids scrolling until you absolutely want to. Instead of scrolling, or even skimming the messages in a stream, you just look at Sonar and see if there are any trends you care about. If there are, you click to zoom in and see only those messages. It’s extremely effective and productive.

Sonar is just one of many visualizations that could help with keeping up with change in huge streams. But it’s also only one piece of the solution. Another key piece of the solution is finding things in streams.

Finding Things in Streams

Above, we discussed problems and solutions related to keeping up with streams that are full of noise and constantly changing. Now let’s discuss another set of problems and solutions related to finding things in streams.

Filtering the Stream

For a visualization like Sonar to be effective, you need the ability to filter the stream for the sources and messages you want, so there isn’t too much noise in the visualization. The ability to filter the stream for just those subsets of messages you actually care about is going to be absolutely essential in coming years.

Streams are going to become increasingly filled with noise. But another way to think about noisy streams is that they are really just lots of less-noisy streams multiplexed together.

What we need is a way to intelligently and automatically de-multiplex them back into their component sub-streams.

For example, take the stream of all the messages you receive from Twitter and Facebook combined. That’s probably a pretty noisy stream. It’s hard to read, hard to keep up with, and quickly becomes a drag.

In Bottlenose you can automatically de-multiplex your streams into a bunch of sub-streams that are easier to manage. You can then read these, or view them via Sonar, to see what’s going on at a glance.

For example, you can instantly create sub-streams – which are really just filters on your  stream of everything. You might make one for just messages by people you like, another for just messages by influencers, another for just news articles related to your interests, another for just messages that are trending, another of just photos and videos posted by your friends, etc.

The ability to filter streams – to mix them and then unmix them – is going to be an essential tool for working with streams.

Searching the Stream

In the first article in this series we saw how online attention and traffic is shifting from search to social. Social streams are quickly becoming key drivers for how content on the Web is found. But how are things found in social streams? It turns out existing search engines, like Google, are not well-suited for searching in streams.

Existing algorithms for Web search do not work well for Streams. For example, consider Google’s PageRank algorithm.

In order to rank the relevancy of Web pages, PageRank needs a very rich link structure. It needs a Web of pages with lots of links between the documents. The link structure is used to determine which pages are the best for various topics. Effectively links are like votes – when pages about a topic link to other pages about that topic, they are effectively voting for or endorsing those pages.

While PageRank may be ideal for figuring out what Web pages are best, it doesn’t help much for searching messages, because messages may have no links at all, or may be only very sparsely linked together. There isn’t enough data in individual messages to figure out much about them.

So how do you know if a given message is important? How do you figure out what messages in a stream actually matter?

When searching the stream, instead of finding everything, we need to NOT find the stuff we don’t want. We need to filter out the noise. And that requires new approaches to search. We’ve already discussed filtering above and the ability to filter streams is a per-requisite for searching them intelligently. Beyond that, you need to be able to measure what is going on within streams, in order to detect emerging trends and influence.

The approach we’re taking in Bottlenose to solve this is a set of algorithms we call “StreamRank.” In StreamRank we analyze the series of messages in a stream to figure out what topics, people, links and messages are trending over time.

We also analyze the reputations or influence of message authors, and the amount of response (such as retweets or replies or likes) that messages receive.

In addition, we also measure the relevance of messages and their authors to the user, based on what we know of the user’s interest graph and social graph.

This knowledge enables us to rank messages in a number of ways: by date, by popularity, by relevance, by influence, and by activity.

Another issue that comes up when searching the Stream is that many messages in streams are quite strange looking – they don’t look like properly formed sentences or paragraphs. They don’t look like English, for example. They contain all sorts of abbreviations, hashtags, @replies, and short URLs, and they often lack punctuation and are scrunched to fit in 140 character Twitter messages.

Search algorithms that use any kind of linguistics, disambiguation, natural language processing, or semantics, don’t work well out of the box on these messy messages.

To apply such techniques you need to rewrite them so that they work on short, messy, strange looking messages. This is also something we’ve built in Bottlenose — we’ve built a new natural language processing and topic detection engine in Javascript that is designed specifically to handle these types of streams and messages.

These are some of the new challenges and solutions we’re applying in Bottlenose to make working with streams more productive. They are components of what we call our “StreamOS,” a new high-level Javascript and HTML5 operating system for applications that need to do smart things with streams. We’ll be writing a lot more about this in future articles.

In Part I of this series, The Message is the Medium, I wrote about some of the shifts that are taking place as the center of online attention shifts from documents to messages.

Here in Part II, we will explore some of the deeper problems that this shift is bringing about.

New Challenges in the Era of the Stream

Today the Stream has truly arrived. The Stream is becoming primary and the Web is becoming secondary. And with this shift, we face tremendous new challenges, particularly around overload. I wrote about some of these problems for Mashable in an article called, “Sharepocalypse Now.”

The Sharepocalypse is here. It’s just too easy to share, there is too much stuff being shared, there are more people sharing, and more redundant ways to share the same things. The result is that we are overloaded with messages coming at us from all sides.

For example, I receive around 13,000 messages/day via various channels, and I’m probably a pretty typical case. You can see a more detailed analysis here.

As the barrier to messaging has become lower and people have started sending more messages than ever before, messaging behavior has changed. What used to be considered spam is now considered to be quite acceptable.

Noise is Increasing

In the 1990’s emailing out a photo of the interesting taco you are having for lunch to everyone you know would have been considered highly spammy behavior. But today we call that “foodspotting” and we happily send out pictures of our latest culinary adventure on multiple different social networks at once.

Spam is the New Normal

It’s not just foodspotting – the same thing is happening with check-ins, and with the new behavior of “pinning” things (the new social bookmarking) that is taking place in Pinterest. Activities that used to be considered noise have somehow started to be thought of as signal. But in fact, for most people, they are still really noise.

The reason this is happening is that the barrier to sharing is much lower than it once was. Email messages took some thought to compose – they were at least a few paragraphs long. But today you can share things that are 140 characters or less, or just a photo without even any comments. It’s instant and requires no investment or thought.

Likewise, in the days of email you had to at least think, “is it appropriate to send this or will it be viewed as spam?” Today people don’t even have that thought anymore. Send everything to everyone all the time. Spam is the new normal.

Sharing is a good thing, but like any good thing, too much of it becomes a problem.

The solution is not to get people to think before sharing, or to share less, or to unfollow people, or to join social networks where you can only follow a few people (like Path or Pair), it’s to find a smarter way to deal with the overload that is being created.

Notifications Overload

Sharing is not the only problem we’re facing. There are many other activities that generate messages as well. For example, we’re getting increasing numbers of notifications messages from apps. These notifications are not the result of a person sharing something, they are the result of an app wanting to get our attention.

We’re getting many types of notifications, for example:

• When people follow us
• When we’re tagged in photos
• When people want to be friends with us
• When there are news articles that match our interests
• When friends check-in to various places
• When people are near us
• When our flights are delayed
• When our credit scores change
• When things we ordered are shipped
• When there are new features in apps we use
• When issue tickets are filed or changed
• When files are shared with us
• When people mention or reply to us
• When we have meeting invites, acceptances, cancellations, or meetings are about to start
• When we have unread messages waiting for us in a social network

The last bullet bears an extra mention. I have noticed that LinkedIn for example, sends me these notifications about notifications. Yes, we are even getting notifications about notifications!

When you get messages telling you that you have messages, that’s when you really know the problem is getting out of hand.

Fragmented Attention

Another major problem that the Stream is bringing about is the fragmentation of attention.

Today email is not enough. If it wasn’t enough work that we each have several email inboxes to manage, we are now also getting increasing volumes of messages outside of email in entirely different inboxes for specialized apps. We have too many inboxes.

It used to be that to keep up with your messages all you needed was an email client.

Then the pendulum swung to the Web and it started to become a challenge to keep up with all the Web sites we needed to track every day.

So RSS was invented and for a brief period it seemed that the RSS reader would be adopted widely and solve the problem of keeping up with the Web.

But then social networks came out and they circumvented RSS, forcing users to keep up in social-network specific apps and inboxes.

So a new class of “social dashboard” apps (like Tweetdeck) were created to keep up with social networks, but they didn’t include email or RSS, or all the other Web apps and silos.

This trend towards fragmentation has continued – an increasing array of social apps and web apps can really only be adequately monitored in those same apps. You can’t really effectively keep up with them in email, in RSS, or via social networks. You have to login to those apps to get high-fidelity information about what is going on.

We’re juggling many different inboxes. These include email, SMS, voicemail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+, YouTube, Yammer, Dropbox, Chatter, Google Reader, Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, as well as inboxes in specialized tools like Github, Uservoice, Salesforce, and many other apps and services.

Alan Lepofsky, at Constellation Research, created a somewhat sarcastic graph to illustrate this problem, in his article, “Are We Really Better Off Without Email?” The graph is qualitative – it’s not based on direct numbers – but in my opinion it is probably very close to the truth.

What this graph shows is that email usage peaked around 2005/2006, after which several new forms of messaging began to get traction. As these new apps grew, they displaced email for some kinds of messaging activities, but more importantly, they fragmented our messaging and thus our attention.

The takeaway from this graph is that we will all soon be wishing for the good old days of email overload. Email overload was nothing compared to what we’re facing now.

The Message Volume Explosion

As well as increasing noise and the fragmentation of the inbox, we’re also seeing huge increases in message volume.

Message volume per day, in all messaging channels, is growing. In some of these channels, such as social messaging, it is growing exponentially. For example, look at this graph of Twitter’s growth in message volume per day since 2009, from the Bottlenose blog:

Twitter now transmits 340 Million messages per day, which is more than double the number of messages per day in March of 2011.

If this trend continues then in a year there will be between 500 million and 800 million messages per day flowing through Twitter.

And that’s just Twitter – Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, and many other streams are also growing. And email messages are also increasing as well, thanks to all the notifications that are being sent to email by various apps.

Message volume is growing across all channels. This is going to have several repercussions for all of us.

Engagement is Threatened

First of all, the signal-to-noise ratio of social media, and other messaging channels, is going to become increasingly bad as volume increases. There’s going to be less signal and more noise. It is going to get harder to find the needles in the haystack that we want, because there is going to be so much more hay.

Today, on services like Twitter and Facebook, signal-to-noise is barely tolerable already. But as this situation gets worse in the next two years, we are going to become increasingly frustrated. And when this happens we are going to stop engaging.

When signal-to-noise in a channel gets too out of hand, it becomes unproductive and inefficient to use that channel. In the case of social media, we are right on cusp of this happening. And when this happens, people will simply stop engaging. And when engagement falls the entire premise of social media will start to fail.

This is already starting to happen. One recent article by George Colony, CEO of analyst firm, Forrester Research, cites a recent study that found that 56% of time spent on social media is wasted.

When you start hearing numbers like this, it means that consumers are not getting the signal they need most of the time, and this will inevitably result in a decrease in satisfaction and engagement.

What’s Next?

We have seen some of the issues that are coming about, or may soon come about, as the Stream continues to grow. But what’s going to happen next? How is the Stream, and our tools for interacting with it, going to adapt?

Click here to read Part III of this series, Keeping Up With the Stream, where we’ll explore various approaches do solving these problems.

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

Back in 2009, I wrote an article called “Welcome to the Stream – Next Phase of the Web” which discussed the early signs of this shift. Around the same time, Erick Schonfeld, at TechCrunch, also used the term in his article, “Jump Into the Stream.” Many others undoubtedly were thinking the same thing: The Stream would be the next evolution of the Web.

What we predicted has come to pass, and now we’re in this new landscape of the Stream, facing new challenges and opportunities that we’re only beginning to understand.

In this series of articles I’m going to explore some of the implications of this shift to the Stream, and where I think this trend is going. Along the way we’re going to dive deep into some major sea changes, emerging problems, and new solutions.

From Documents to Messages

The shift to the Stream is the latest step in a cycle that seems to repeat. Online attention appears to swing like a pendulum from documents to messages and back every few decades.

Before the advent of the Web, the pendulum was swinging towards messaging. The center of online attention was messaging via email, chat and threaded discussions. People spent most of their online time doing things with messages. Secondarily, they spent time in documents, for example doing word-processing.

Then the Web was born and the pendulum swung rapidly from messages to documents. All of a sudden Web pages – documents – became more important than messages. During this period the Web browser became more important than the email client.

But with the growth of social media, the pendulum is swinging back from documents to messaging again.

Today, the focus of our online attention is increasingly focused towards messages, not Web pages. We are getting more messages, and more types of messages, from more apps and relationships, than ever before.

We’re not only getting social messages, we’re getting notifications messages. And they are coming to us from more places – especially from social networks, content providers, and social apps of all kinds.

More importantly, messages are now our starting points for the Web — we are discovering things on the Web from messages. When we visit Web pages, it’s more often a result of us finding some link via a message that was sent to us, or shared with us. The messages are where we begin, they are primary, and Web pages are secondary.

From Search to Social

Another sign of the shift from the Web to the Stream is that consumers are spending more time in social sites like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter than on search engines or content sites.

In December of 2011, Comscore reported that social networking ranked as the most popular content category in online engagement, accounting for 19% of all consumer time spent online.

These trends have led some such as VC, Fred Wilson, to ask, “how long until social drives more traffic than search?”  Fred’s observation was that his own blog was getting more traffic from social media sites than from Google.

Ben Elowitz, the CEO of Wetpaint, followed up on this by pointing out that according to several sources of metrics, the shift to social supplanting search as the primary traffic driver on the Web was well underway.

According to Ben’s analysis, the top 50 sites were getting almost as much traffic from Facebook as from Google by December of 2011. Seven of these top 50 sites were already getting 12% more visits from Facebook than from Google, up from 5 of these top sites just a month earlier.

The shift from search to social is just one of many signs that the era of the Stream has arrived and we are now in a different landscape than before.

The Web has changed, the focus is now on messages, not documents. This leads to many new challenges and opportunities. It’s almost as if we are in a new Web, starting from scratch – it’s 1994 all over again.

Click here to continue on to Part II of this series, Drowning in the Stream, where we’ll dig more deeply into some of the unique challenges of the Stream.

For some people the experience of being conscious is so vivid that it is literally striking, almost shocking to them at times. It is clearly apparent to them that consciousness is a totally unique and mysterious phenomenon.

The startling reality of consciousness is undeniable and self-evident to people who recognize it vividly — they can see that they are conscious and they can see that consciousness is something really special — something formless, empty, unfathomable, and transcendental in nature. It transcends the body and the mind, it transcends the physical material world, it transcends thoughts and emotions. It is more fundamental than anything. It seems to be the ultimate fabric of reality itself.

When consciousness is directly recognized to this extent, it is obvious that it is not a process or a substance or anything material or reducible for that matter – and it takes place in a completely different dimension from everything else. It’s not mediated by one particular sense or even by the cognitive faculty that thinks thoughts. It is a necessary condition for all of the senses and the mind, but it’s not identical to any of them. It’s something else altogether.

A good analogy is that consciousness is like the light of a movie projector and all phenomena of the senses and the mind are images in the movie being projected by that light. This is how it actually seems to be when carefully analyzed.

Another analogy is that consciousness is like a dreamer, and all phenomena are like dream appearances within its dreams — but this analogy is imperfect because it ascribes a self or identity to consciousness where in fact there is none (any self or identity is merely a construct appearing within or to consciousness, not an attribute of consciousness itself. Actual consciousness has no self or identity).

When carefully examined it is found that consciousness is empty of entity or substance – it is not a “thing” that can be grasped, it is not something that can be said to be one or many, or that can be said to be a kind of universal mind. But there is something so transcendental about it one is tempted to say it is divine, or that it is the divine being at the heart of reality. However such statements actually limit what consciousness is and are not exactly pure or correct.

Consciousness as it actually is is not something that can be labelled or pinpointed – it’s vast and unbounded, and completely empty of anything that can be limited or labelled. It is not “something” or “nothing” — it is beyond such distinctions.

It cannot even actually be found to be a thing, nor to be nothing. It has no shape or color, no location, and no content of its own. Its scope is boundless, without center or edges, without beginning or end — if you observe consciousness you cannot find such boundaries in it.

Despite having no characteristics that can be found or grasped, consciousness is absolutely brilliantly open, clear and bright. It is very similar to light, or space, except that light and space are not awake — they are not aware — so these analogies have limited value.

If you see your own consciousness vividly for yourself it is a powerful experience, a reminder that there is something much more to being, and to the cosmos, than meets the eye. That which is the very essence of each sentient being is actually the most amazing phenomena in the universe — there is nothing more astonishing than consciousness.

What is really strange however is that some people are not aware of their own consciousness and don’t recognize how special it is. They just don’t notice it, they don’t appreciate it, and overlook it, even when it is staring right through their own eyes.

If you try to speak to such people about consciousness and why it is such a mystery, why it is special, why it is not like anything else, and why it is fundamental, they simply don’t understand, or their eyes glaze over and they tune you out, or in the worst case, they judge you as some kind of a nutcase or fanatic.

But in fact, exploring and appreciating consciousness is not “woo woo” behavior at all. It’s one of the most important things to do in life. And if it’s done rigorously and carefully, without imposing a lot of beliefs on it in advance, it can actually be as scientific and valid as any other process of careful observation and study.

Nobody is actually any more or less conscious than anyone else, but not everyone realizes how conscious they are, or even what consciousness is actually like (when not mixed with thoughts and sensations). What varies is not consciousness itself, but our conceptual understanding and personal recognition of consciousness.

We sentient beings are not inanimate objects, we are awake, we are aware — we are conscious, but strangely this is not a startling and important realization, to everyone. Some people don’t notice it at all — they go through life like sleepwalkers completely unaware of the miraculous jewel of consciousness that is right at the center of their own experience. This is a waste of the precious opportunity of being alive – it is like not really or fully being alive in fact.

But if you really see your own consciousness as it is, directly and clearly, you cannot help but experience a sense of awe, wonder, appreciation and mystery. It’s like witnessing a miracle. Except the miracle is your own true nature. This makes life something more amazing and wonderful. It makes every moment special. At the very least, this is a better way to live, a richer level of experience, and better use of the opportunity of being alive.

Fortunately anyone can develop a greater appreciation and recognition of consciousness, even people who presently are completely ignorant of its significance. It has nothing to do with intelligence or education level, all it takes is learning how to recognize consciousness and then practicing that.

Recognizing consciousness is different than observing a physical thing, and it’s also different than having a subjective thought. Consciousness is neither an object or a subject of a thought – rather it is the pure and simple light of knowing or being. It is not something you can focus on, and it is not some kind of transcendental self. It is beyond these limited kinds of experience, in its actual nature.

To recognize consciousness directly, in its pure form, you have to meditate without actually meditating on something. This is called non-meditation, a form of meditation in which you don’t meditate, but you don’t get distracted either. You do not strive for some goal or result. You do not focus on some thought or object. You do not attempt to prevent thoughts or perceptions. You do not grasp at something or reject something. You simply just be.

Allow yourself to momentarily rest in a state of being that is timeless and inconceivable, yet vividly awake and clear. This is the how the mind is when it is completely at rest, when there are not even any thoughts arising for a moment. When the mind rests like this, there is a brief glimpse of consciousness as it really is (as opposed to a subtle conceptualization of consciousness or a subtle sensory or mental experience that is not actually the same as pure consciousness). It is clear in the gap between one thought and the next, but in fact whether or not there are thoughts it is equally present and stable.

Once you have recognized consciousness as it really is – pure, clear, bright and limitless – then the next thing to do is expand the length and strength of this recognition. At first it lasts only for a second before concepts arise and one falls into distracted conceptualization again. But gradually, with practice, you can learn to rest in a state of non-conceptual, non-dualistic, awareness – pure consciousness, for longer periods of time. This is different than having advanced meditation experiences, or learning to concentrate on something. It is not being distracted by anything, rather than concentrating on something in particular.

The Buddhist traditions of Zen and Dzogchen, in particular, teach expedient methods for developing the ability to recognize consciousness more and more fully. But you don’t have to be a Buddhist to do this practice — this recognition is not the property of some particular religion or philosophy. Everyone has equal access to it, it is their birthright.

Recognizing consciousness in its pure form and realizing its significance is a direct route to experiencing transcendence and union with the ultimate nature of reality. That alone is enough to make it worthwhile. But there are other benefits as well.

Familiarity with the nature of consciousness gradually changes how one lives and acts in the world — it reduces confusion and leads to more beneficial, more compassionate, more selfless actions and decisions. This is not only good for the individual, it is good for relationships, and for communities. Ultimately as one develops this further in this practice it can lead to higher levels of individual and collective spiritual realization.

There is no end to the depth of this realization, and even when fully realized, there is no graspable “realization” that can be grasped or expressed or owned. That is why the wisest and most realized beings are usually the most humble and simple and would never claim to be special. They recognize that consciousness is not their property, not something they control or have exclusive access to.

The process of developing this realization is a process of shedding layers of conceptual confusion and ignorance and returning to the pure and simple light of wisdom that is everyone’s actual nature. It’s really that simple. But it’s extremely difficult in practice.

I believe that all the great religions have this same wisdom and purpose at the heart of their highest teachings — but they apply different methods and conceptual constructs to help people progress. Some may be more expedient and less conceptual, than others, but in the end what they are pointing to is the same. How one chooses to practice is a matter of personal taste, but in the end, the purpose and result of these paths are all the same.

But while this evidence is fascinating, I don’t believe that ultimately the universe is in fact a computer. In this article, I explain why.

My primary argument for this is that consciousness is not computable. Since consciousness is an undeniable phenomenon that we directly experience, the universe has to be more than a mere computer, because a computer cannot create or simulate consciousness. No universe that is merely a computer or a computation can generate or account for consciousness. Below I explain this in more detail.

Consciousness is More Fundamental Than Computation

If the universe is a computer, it would have to be a very different kind of computer than what we think of as a computer today. It would have to be capable of a kind of computation that transcends what our computers can presently do. It would have to be capable of generating all the strangeness of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Perhaps one might posit that it is a quantum computer of some sort.

However, it’s not that simple. IF the universe is any kind of computer, it would actually have to be able to create every phenomenon that exists, and that includes consciousness.

The problem is that conscious is notoriously elusive, and may not even be something a computer could ever generate. After decades of thinking about this question from many angles, I seriously doubt that consciousness is computable.

In fact, I don’t think consciousness is an information process, or a material thing, at all. It seems, from my investigations, that consciousness is not a “thing” that exists “in” the universe, but rather it is in the category of fundamentals just like space and time. For example, space and time are not “in” the universe, rather the universe is “in” space and time. I think the same can be said about consciousness. In fact, I would go so far as to say consciousness is probably more fundamental than space and time, they are in “in” it rather than it being “in” them.

There are numerous arguments for why consciousness may be fundamental. Here I will summarize a few of my favorites:

• Physics and Cosmology. First of all there is evidence in physics, such as the double slit experiment, that indicates there may be a fundamental causal connection between the act of consciously observing something and what is actually observed. Observation seems to be intimately connected to what the universe does, to what is actually measured. It is as if the act of observation — of measurement — actually causes the universe to make choices that collapse possibilities into specific outcomes. This implies that consciousness may be connected to the fundamental physical laws and the very nature of the universe. Taken to the extreme there are even physical theories, such as the anthropic principle, that postulate that the whole point of the universe, and all the physical laws, is consciousness.
• Simulation. Another approach to analyzing consciousness is to attempt to simulate, or synthesize consciousness with software, where one quickly ends up in either an infinite regress or a system that is not conscious of its own consciousness. Trying to build a conscious machine, even in principle, is very instructive and everyone who is seriously interested in this subject should attempt it until they are convinced it is not possible. In particular self-awareness, the consciousness of consciousness, is hard to model. Nobody has succeeded in designing a conscious machine so far. Nobody has even succeeded in designing a non-conscious machine that can fool a conscious being into thinking it is a conscious being. Try it. I dare you. I tried many times and in end I came to the conclusion that consciousness, and in particular self-consciousness, lead to infinite regresses that computers are not capable of resolving in finite time.
• Neuroscience. Another approach is to try to locate consciousness in the physical brain, the body, or anywhere in the physical world – nobody has yet found it. Consciousness may have correlates in the brain, but they are not equivalent to consciousness. John Searle and others have written extensively about this issue. Why do we even have brains then? Are they the source of consciousness, or are they more like electrical circuits that merely channel it without originating it, or are brains the source of memory and cognition, but not consciousness itself? There are many possibilities and we’re only at the beginning of understanding the mind-brain connection. However so far, after centuries of dissecting the brain, and mapping it, and measuring it in all kinds of ways, no consciousness has been found inside it.
• Direct Introspection. One approach is through direct experience: search for an origin of knowing, by observing your own consciousness directly, with your own consciousness. No origin is found. There is no homunculus in the back of our minds that we can identify. In fact, when you search, even mere consciousness is not found, let alone its source. The more we look the more it dissolves. Consciousness is a word we use, but when we look for it we can’t find what it refers to. But that doesn’t mean consciousness isn’t a real phenomenon, or that it is an illusion. It is undeniable that we are aware of things, including of the experience of being conscious. It is unfindable, yet it is not a mere nothingness either – there is definitely some kind of awareness or consciousness taking place that is in fact the very essence of our minds. The nature of consciousness exemplifies the Buddhist concept of the “emptiness” in a manner that we can easily and directly experience for ourselves. But note that “empty” in this sense doesn’t mean nothingness, or non-existence, it means that it exists in a manner that transcends being either something or nothing. From the Buddhist perspective, although consciousness cannot be found, it is in fact the ultimate nature of reality, from which everything else appears.
• Logic. Another approach is logical: Recognize that all experience is mediated by consciousness — all measurements, all science, all our own personal experience, all our collective experiences. Nothing ever happens or is known by us without first being mediated by consciousness. Thus consciousness is more fundamental than anything we know of, it is the most fundamental experience, even more fundamental than the experience of space and time, or our measurements thereof. From this perspective we cannot honestly say that anything ever can exist apart from consciousness, from someone or something knowing it. In fact, it would appear that everything depends on consciousness to be known, and possibly to exist, because we have no way to establish that anything exists apart from consciousness. Based on the evidence we have, consciousness is therefore fundamental. The universe appears to be in consciousness not vice-versa: This is in fact a more logical and more scientific conclusion than the standard belief that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, or that it is a separate phenomenon from appearances. In the extreme, this investigation leads to a philosophical view called solipsism. However note that the Buddhist view (above) transcends solipsim because, in fact there is no self in consciousness – anything you can label as “self” or “I” is actually just an appearance in consciousness, not consciousness in pure form. Since there is no self, you cannot claim that you own consciousness, or that everything exists in “your” consciousness – because there is no way to assert a self that owns or is consciousness that contains everything else, nor can any “other” be asserted either. Since consciousness is more fundamental than self, or the self-other dichotomy, the view of solipsism is defeated. Instead consciousness transcends self and other, one and many.
• Unusual experiences. Yet another approach is to observe consciousness under unusual or extreme conditions such as during dreaming, lucid dreaming, religious experiences, peak experiences, when under the influence of mind-altering drugs, or in numerous well-documented cases of apparent reincarnation, and well-documented near-death experiences. In such cases there is a wealth of both direct and anecdotal evidence suggestive of the idea that consciousness is able to transcend the limits of the body, as well as space and time. Whether you believe such evidence is valid is up to you, however there is an increasing body of careful studies on these topics that are indicative that there is a lot more to consciousness than our day-to-day waking state.

Beyond Computation

Because of the above lines of reasoning and observation I have come to the conclusion that consciousness transcends the physical, material world. It is something different, something special. And it does not seem to be computable, because it has no specific form, substance or even content that can be represented as information or as an information process.

For example, in order to to be the product of a computation, consciousness would need to be comprised of information — there would need to be some way to completely describe and implement it with information, or an a information process — that is, with bits in a computer system. Information processes cannot operate without information – they require bits 1′s and 0′s, and some kind of a program for doing things with them.

So the question is, can any set or process of 1′s and 0′s perfectly simulate or synthesize what is to be conscious? I don’t think so. Because consciousness, when examined, is found to be literally formless and unfindable, it has no content or form that can be represented with 1′s and 0′s. Furthermore, because consciousness, when examined is essentially changeless, it is not a process – for a process requires some kind of change. Therefore it is not information or an information process.

Some people counter the above argument by saying that consciousness is an illusion, a side-effect, or what is called an “epiphenomenon” of the brain. They claim that there is no such thing as actual consciousness, and that there is nothing more to cognition than the machinery of the brain. They are completely missing the fundamental point.

But let’s assume they are right for a moment – if there is no consciousness, then what is taking place when a being knows something, or when they know their own knowing capacity? How could that be modeled in a computer program? Simply creating a data structure and process that represents its own state recursively is not sufficient – because it is static, it is just data – there is no actual qualia of knowing taking place in that system.

Try as one might, there is no way to design a machine or program that manifests the ability to know or experience the actual qualia of experiences. John Searle’s Chinese Room though experiment is a famous logical argument that illustrates this. The simple act of following instructions – which is all a computer can do – never results in actually knowing what those instructions mean, or what it is doing. The knowing aspect of mind – the consciousness – is not computable.

Not only can consciousness not be simulated or synthesized by a computer, it cannot be found in a computer or computer program. It cannot magically emerge in a computer of sufficient complexity.

For example, suppose we build up a computer or computer program by gradually adding tiny bits of additional complexity — at what point does it suddenly transition from being not-conscious to being conscious? There is no sudden transition to consciousness — I call that kind of thinking “magical complexity” – and many people today are guilty of it. However it’s just an intellectual cop-out. There is nothing special about complexity that suddenly and magically causes consciousness to appear out of nowhere.

Consciousness is not an emergent property of anything, nor is dependent on anything. It does not come from the brain, and it does not depend on the brain. It is not part of the brain either. Instead, it would be more correct to say that brain is perhaps an instrument of consciousness, or a projection that occurs within consciousness.

One analogy is that the brain channels consciousness, like an electrical circuit channels electricity. In a circuit the electricity does not come from the circuitry, it’s fundamentally the energy of the universe – the circuit is just a conduit for it.

A better analogy however is that the brain is actually a projection of conscious just as a character in a dream is a projection of the dreaming mind. Within a dream there can be fully functional, free-standing characters that have bodies, personalities and that seem to have minds of their own, but in fact they are all just projections of the dreaming mind. Similarly the brain appears to be a machine that functions a certain way, but it is less fundamental than the consciousness that projects it.

How could this be the case, it sounds so strange! However, if I phrase it differently all of a sudden it sounds perfectly normal. Instead of “consciousness” let’s say “space-time.” The brain is a projection of space-time, space-time does not emerge from the brain. That sounds perfectly reasonable.

The key is that we have to think of consciousness as the same level of phenomena as space-time, as a fundamental aspect of the universe. The brain is a space-time-consciousness machine, and the conceptual mind is what that machine is experiencing and doing. However, space-time-consciousness is more fundamental than the machinery of the brain, and even when the brain dies, space-time-consciousness continues.

For the above reasons, I think that consciousness proves that the universe is not a computer — at least not on the ultimate, final level of analysis. Even if the universe contains computers, or contains processes that compute, the ultimate level of reality is probably not a computer.

But let’s, for the purpose of being thorough, suppose that we take the opposite view, that the universe IS a computer and everything in it is a computation. This view leads to all sorts of problems.

If we say that the universe is a computation, it would imply that everything — all energy, space, time and consciousness — are taking place within the computation. But then what is the computation coming from and where is it happening? A computation requires a computer to compute it — some substrate that does the computation. Where is this substrate? What is it made of? It cannot also be made of energy, space, time or consciousness — those are all “inside” the computation, they are not the substrate, the computer.

Where is the computer that generates this universal computation? Is it generating itself? That is a circular reference that doesn’t make sense. For example, you can’t make a computer program that generates the computer that runs it. The computer has to be there before the program, it can’t come from the program. A computation requires a computer to compute it, and that computer cannot be the same thing as the computation it generates.

If we posit a computer that exists beyond everything – beyond energy, space and time — how could it compute anything? Computation requires energy, space and time — without energy there is no information, and without space and time there is no change, and thus no computation. A computer that exists beyond everything could not actually do any computation.

One might try to answer this by saying that the universal computation takes place on a computer that exists in a meta-level space-time beyond ours — in other words it exists in a meta-universe beyond our universe. But that answer contradicts the claim that our universe is a computer – because it means that what appears to be a universe computer is really not the final level of reality. The final level of reality in this case is the meta-universe that contains the computer that is computing our universe. That just pushes the problem down a level.

Alternatively one could claim that in fact the meta-universe beyond our universe is also a computer – So our universe computer exists inside a meta-level universe computer. In this case it’s “computers all the way down” – an infinite regress of meta-computers containing meta-computers containing meta-computers. But to claim that is a bit of a logical cop-out, because then there is no final computer behind it all – thus there is no source or end of computation. If such infinite chains of computations could exist it would be difficult to say they actually compute anything since they could never start or complete, and thus this claim is not that unlike claiming that the universe is NOT a computer.

In the end we face the same metaphysical problems we’ve always faced – either there is a fundamental level of reality that we cannot ever really understand, or we fall into paradoxes and infinite regress. Digital physics may have some explanatory power, but it has its limits.

But then what does it mean that we find error correcting codes in the equations of supersymmetry? If the fundamental laws of our universe contain computer codes in them, how can we say the universe is not a computer? Perhaps the universe IS a computer, but it’s a computer that is appearing within something that fundamentally is not computable, something like consciousness perhaps. But can something that is not computable generate or contain computations? That’s an interesting question.

Consciousness is certainly capable of containing computations, even if it is not a computation. A simple example of this would be a dream about a computer that is computing something. In such a dream there is an actual computer doing computations, but the computer and the computations depend on something (consciousness) that is not coming from a computer and is not a computation.

In the end I think it’s more likely that ultimate reality is not a computer – that it is a field of consciousness that is beyond computation. But that doesn’t mean that universes that appear to be computations can’t appear within it.

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” — Chuang Chou

Further Reading

If you are interested in exploring the nature of consciousness more directly, the next article in this series, Recognizing The Significance of Consciousness, explains what consciousness is actually like, in its pure form, and how to develop a better recognition of it for yourself.

You can read a non-technical description of what Dr. Gates has discovered in this article, which I highly recommend.

In the article, Gates asks, “How could we discover whether we live inside a Matrix? One answer might be ‘Try to detect the presence of codes in the laws that describe physics.’” And this is precisely what he has done. Specifically, within the equations of supersymmetry he has found, quite unexpectedly, what are called “doubly-even self-dual linear binary error-correcting block codes.” That’s a long-winded label for codes that are commonly used to remove errors in computer transmissions, for example to correct errors in a sequence of bits representing text that has been sent across a wire.

Gates explains, “This unsuspected connection suggests that these codes may be ubiquitous in nature, and could even be embedded in the essence of reality. If this is the case, we might have something in common with the Matrix science-fiction films, which depict a world where everything human being’s experience is the product of a virtual-reality-generating computer network.”

Why are these codes hidden in the laws of fundamental particles? “Could it be that codes, in some deep and fundamental way, control the structure of our reality?,” he asks. It’s a good question.

If you want to explore further, here is a Youtube video by someone who is interested in popularizing Dr. Gates’ work, containing an audio interview that is worth hearing. Here, you can hear Gates describe the potential significance of his discovery in layman’s terms. The video then goes on to explain how all of this might be further evidence for Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis (in which it is suggested that the universe is a computer simulation). (NOTE: The video is a bit annoying – in particular the melodramatic soundtrack, but it’s still worth watching in order to get a quick high level overview of what this is all about, and some of the wild implications).

Now why does this discovery matter? Well it is more than strange and intriguing that fundamental physics equations that describe the universe would contain these error correcting codes. Could it mean that the universe itself is built with error correcting codes in it, codes that that are just like those used in computers and computer networks? Did they emerge naturally, or are they artifacts of some kind of intelligent design? Or do they indicate the universe literally IS a computer? For example maybe the universe is a cellular automata machine, or perhaps a loop quantum gravity computer.

Digital Physics – A New Kind of Science

The view that the universe is some kind of computer is called digital physics – it’s a relatively new niche field within physics that may be destined for major importance in the future. But these are still early days.

I’ve been fascinated by the possibility that the universe is a computer since college, when I first found out about the work of Ed Fredkin on his theory that the universe is a cellular automaton — for, example, like John Conway’s Game of Life algorithm (particularly this article, excerpted from the book Three Scientists and their Gods).

Following this interest, I ended up interning in a supercomputing lab that was working on testing these possibilites, at MIT, with the authors of this book on “Cellular Automata Machines.”

Later I had the opportunity to become friends with Stephen Wolfram, whose magnum opus, “A New Kind of Science” is the ultimate, and also heaviest, book on this topic.

I asked Stephen about what he thinks about this idea and he said it is, “a bit like saying ‘there’s a Fibonacci sequence there; this must be a phenomenon based on rabbits’.  Error-correcting codes have a certain mathematical structure, associated e.g. with sphere packing.  You don’t have to use them to correct errors. But it’s definitely an amusing thought that one could detect the Matrix by looking for robustification features of code.  Of course, today’s technology/code rarely has these … because our computers are already incredibly reliable (and probably getting more so)”

The work of Dr. Gates, is at the very least, an interesting new development for this field. At best it might turn out to be a very important clue about the nature of the universe, although it’s very early and purely theoretical at this point. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

However, I personally don’t believe the universe will turn out to be a computer or a computation. Read the next article in this series to find out why I think Consciousness is Not a Computation.

 Notes:

• Seth Lloyd, professor quantum mechanical engineering at MIT, has written a book that describes his theory that the universe is a quantum computer.
• Here’s a good article that explores various views related to the idea the universe is a computation in some more detail.

Three good articles came out covering it:

ReadWriteWeb – Bottlenose is a 6th Sense for the Social Web

SemanticWeb.com – Bottlenose Beta Two Features New Layout, Visuals

TechCrunch – Bottlenose 2.0: Taming the “Share-pocalypse”

Also Robert Scoble blogged about it on Google+ here.

Bottlenose also blogged about the new features and why they are important here.

I’m psyched for this launch. The app has come a long way. The new Sonar features really help me keep up with all my streams in a way that just has never been possible before. Check it out. You can use the semi-secret invite code: getsonar

TechCrunch covered the deal here.

The new combined company is a unique powerhouse in the online video space – covering the entire life cycle of online videos from when they are upcoming, to when they go live, to when they are on-demand.

Sanjay Reddy, my co-founder, and friend, has done an amazing job bringing our vision to life. The deal with OVGuide is a big step forward in the evolution of this project. I look forward to great things from the combined company. Congratulations to the team, and my thanks to our loyal and helpful angel investors. It’s been a very interesting project to be a part of.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Following up on my article about my own experience dealing with a spurious shareholder lawsuit, I put together this list of essential survival tips for entrepreneurs from what I’ve learned. I hope it’s helpful to you.

#1. If you are afraid to fail, don’t be an entrepreneur. Tech ventures often don’t make it, plain and simple.  It’s a risk that we all accept when we start companies or invest in them.  This is such a well-known fact that VC’s assume only a minority of their investments will be successful, and will hopefully be profitable enough to cover their losses. It’s almost certain that if you are involved with enough ventures, you will experience some failures. You have to realize that when you start a venture the odds are against you every step of the way. But don’t let that scare you and never give up.

#2. Lawsuits are more common than you might think. But they’re not the end of the world. If you’ve been around the Valley long enough, you know they’re a dime a dozen. Even if you do well and chalk up a big win, there’s a chance you’ll get sued (think of all the successful entrepreneurs who are being or have been sued by jealous people from the past once they finally made it).  And of course, if your company goes under or sells for a low price, there’s an even greater chance you’ll get sued. It’s just a risk we all take when we start companies. But many lawsuits are questionable and never even make it to court. Others settle. In the end, it’s usually not the end of the world.

#3. You are not alone. I had never been involved in a lawsuit personally and it really shocked me when I was named in a spurious lawsuit. But later people started coming out of the woodwork and sharing their stories.  I found out that many of my colleagues — other entrepreneurs and VCs — have had similar experiences, even though it was not public knowledge. Investor and shareholder lawsuits are rarely talked about because nobody likes to air dirty laundry, but it happens more than you probably realize. If you’ve been sued as a result of a venture deal or acquisition, you are not alone. In fact anyone successful or important becomes a target for lawsuits and it’s not uncommon to be sued. It’s just an unfortunate cost of doing business.

#4. Allegations in legal proceedings should be viewed with skepticism. What really matters is the truth that eventually comes out in court. Our society has become extremely litigious, and a person can allege anything in a lawsuit, regardless of whether or not it turns out to be true. The allegations of a lawsuit can be complete fiction or can be  deliberately overreaching – and it’s up the courts to determine the truth. The rise of spurious and frivolous lawsuits is bad for the economy (but great for lawyers!), yet unless there is legal reform that isn’t going to change. So maintain a healthy skepticism when reading any lawsuit.

#5. Turn your lemons into lemonade. It’s easy to get depressed when you’ve been sued unfairly. But as my wife advised me, “Nova, You can’t expect to take risks or try to do anything significant in the world without having some setbacks. What’s important is not that you fall down, it’s how you pick yourself back up.”  Wise advice.  So I’m staying positive and focusing on moving forward in my life with a number of terrific ventures, great investors and inspiring entrepreneurs. I’m busy working on a new model to help young innovators and entrepreneurs realize their dreams, and some of this model is based on what I’ve learned from my experiences.

#6. Losses can be your biggest teachers. From the loss of my startup I learned a lesson in humility; in how to take my lumps and move on. Losing the company was like losing a child.  It was that hard. And as an intensely loyal person, I hated feeling that I had disappointed people and failed to save the company. I’ll never totally get over it. But I can at least learn from it, and hopefully you can too. Ironically that loss has helped me refocus my life and career on new directions and new growth. Sometimes losses can be the best learning experiences of all.

#7. Be extremely careful about who you accept investment from. Just because an individual approaches you out of the blue and wants to invest in your company doesn’t mean you should accept his or her offer. Make sure they are experienced partners who are aligned with the goals of the business.  And make sure that you draft contractual agreements carefully and unambiguously to minimize the risk of problems down the road.

#8. Get D&O insurance (Directors & Officers insurance). Get as much as you can afford.  This will help to protect you in the event you are faced with the unfortunate prospect of defending a lawsuit in the future. I really don’t think any venture or board of directors should be without this protection in this high-risk economic climate.

#9. Plan for economic downturns. Expect that the economy will continue to remain volatile so make sure to keep your burn rate even lower than what you think is necessary. You’ll be glad you did when the next downturn happens and you need extra runway. Even though we are currently experiencing a new tech venture bubble, it probably won’t last and before we know it we’ll be in another downturn where venture funding will be hard to raise again. Plan your capital strategy accordingly.

#10. Start M&A way before you need to. If you think you may want to get your venture acquired in the next 18 months, start early, while you have plenty of runway, so that you have good negotiating leverage with buyers. It’s much easier to sell when you don’t need to. Don’t let yourself get pushed against the wall and low-balled down the road.

Unfortunately one of them has come to my doorstep.

It is never fun to be forced to deal with such situations, but I decided it would be best to tell you all about it so that you hear it from the horse’s mouth, and so that other entrepreneurs may learn from my experience.

It has been frustrating to have this lawsuit hanging over my head, to have to defend my reputation, and to have to spend so much time on this. And it has been difficult to go through all this, without being able to say anything more detailed about all the evidence I have that demonstrates that there is no merit to the case.

But my lawyers have told me that even the most frivolous lawsuits should be fought in court, not through the media. So up until now I have avoided making any blog posts on this subject.

However, with approval of my lawyers, I am going to comment here once, to set the record straight on this.

The lawsuit in question comes from a plaintiff who was a shareholder in my old company Radar Networks, the makers of Twine.com.

The plaintiff is also the founder of a Bible Website which you can look at here, and which is highly relevant to this lawsuit.

In a nutshell, this one shareholder, out of many that we had, has filed a lawsuit against many of the other shareholders, directors and our acquirer, to try to forcefully regain part of their investment.

This kind of lawsuit is unfortunately not that uncommon when companies are sold, or shut down; It’s just not talked about that much.

The allegations in the lawsuit are simply not in synch with reality.

What’s important to know is that anyone can claim anything they want in a lawsuit, no matter how far from reality it is. All that really matters in the end is the truth that comes out in court.

Regarding the truth, I and my attorneys and everyone who is familiar with this case are confident that the lawsuit is without merit.

Radar Networks, myself, its Board of Directors, and our team, conducted its business properly and with careful oversight. And most importantly, our decisions regarding investment rounds and the eventual sale of the company were made under the extremely professional and diligent advice of several of the most respected Silicon Valley law firms. We were very careful to make sure no investor was treated improperly or unfairly and we acted on advice of counsel in all such matters.

So that’s basically it: The case has no merit. It’s that simple.

But if you are really interested to learn more, feel free to read the rest of this article where I’ll delve into some more details about our funding, the economy, and how the company was eventually sold, in the interest of transparency.

Or, if you’ve read enough, and don’t need more detail, you can just skip to part II where I share some learnings I’ve gleaned from this painful experience — hopefully they will help protect you or other entrepreneurs from going through similar tribulations: 10 Survival Tips for Entrepreneurs That Nobody Likes to Talk About.

Twine

Radar Networks was a labor of love for those involved in it. You can see the history and future of our products here — In a nutshell we were working on semantic social search, the “Holy Grail.” It was a huge technical challenge with great potential.

But was not an easy undertaking – we were going after an ambitious goal, using bleeding-edge new technologies, in a very competitive space. And then right when we were raising our last round of capital, the worst economic recession of any of our lifetimes hit.

Despite all this, all of us who worked on the venture were truly passionate about adding more structure to the Web, and making the Web smarter, based on the W3C’s vision for an open-standards based Semantic Web.

But in the end, we had to sell the company to Evri, a company owned by one of our investors, Paul Allen. It wasn’t the outcome we had hope for, but during the peak of the recession, it wasn’t the worst possible outcome either.

I wrote a postmortem about the company here when we sold the company.

Unfortunately, some ventures just don’t make it. In fact, statistics say that most ventures don’t make it, but we had hoped to be the exception not the rule. But the possibility of failure is the risk all of us took together, a risk that was disclosed and well-understood by all of our investors.

And you can’t go after big ideas and opportunities without taking risks. That’s not to say that failing was easy – it totally sucked – and we worked extremely hard to succeed. But sometimes even your best efforts just aren’t enough.

Nobody was happy with the outcome. Nobody made money from it. It was not what we had hoped and worked for, for so many years.

Selling the Company

Because this is a lawsuit, I’m not allowed to go into much detail, and much of the actual evidence that proves there is no merit to the case has to wait until it can come out in court.

But here is some background that can provide some insight on the context about the situation that Radar Networks was in when we decided to sell to Evri. I am providing this information in order to set the record straight and clarify issues that are raised in the allegations.

Typically search ventures are quite capital intensive. Twine.com’s Semantic Web approach required extensive R&D and infrastructure investment.

Fortunately we had top-tier investors including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Fuse Capital, plus a truly world-class engineering and business team. And everyone believed in the vision and opportunity. In addition, all investors – including angel investors – were informed of the risks of this investment and the both the challenges and potential of the road ahead.

We raised significant funding (in the $20mm+ range) over around 4 years, which included a combination of venture capital and venture debt.

But our funding was still less than the competition. For some comparables: Powersoft raised at least $30mm or more; Metaweb raised around $60mm or more.

It just isn’t cheap to build major semantic search infrastructure like this. So by comparison, Radar Networks raised less and spent less than other comparable companies. From this perspective, if our funding was unusual it was because it was lower than the norm for our category. Despite that, we accomplished a lot.

The first version of Twine attracted a few million monthly visitors at its peak, with around 300,000 registered users, and 25,000 “twines” about particular interests, comprising up to 5 million pieces of user-contributed content. This happened in a relatively short time frame.

We got most of our traffic organically, and via our passionate user base, and via word of mouth buzz. We did limited marketing and advertising, but mainly we focused on word of mouth, viral sharing and invitations, and PR to generate buzz. In addition the large amount of topical user-generated content we published was indexed extensively by search engines, and generated visits.

When the recession hit, investors panicked and pulled back from investing in early-stage tech ventures such as ours. This threw a wrench in our plans to raise our C round of funding which we needed in order to execute our strategy.

So, like many companies in that situation at the time, we took painful and drastic evasive action to reduce our burn and extend our runway to try to outlast the downturn: Everyone took pay cuts, we slashed budgets repeatedly, did rounds of layoffs, and cut business functions, features and goals, to reduce costs and try to last out the downturn.

Around the same time, as luck would have it, Google de-indexed us without warning and our traffic tanked. We still don’t know why they did that – perhaps they viewed us as a competitive search engine, or perhaps their algorithm changed – we don’t know. But when it happened it had a large impact on our site’s traffic.

We tried to petition to get re-indexed with limited success, but never got back to the level of index presence we had had before. This took place during the time frame when we had also drastically reduced our team and budget, and so all things considered, we eventually decided to wait until we could raise more funding, rebuild our team, and deploy the next version of Twine.

On a parallel track to reducing our burn, we were looking for more capital. As well as continuing to seek venture or strategic funding, we explored the potential for selling the company, which we felt was the fiscally responsible thing to do under the circumstances. We hadn’t planned or wanted to sell the company so soon, but we had to explore all options available to us.

Our assets included an award-winning brand, a world-class team, a uniquely powerful platform and product, a passionate user community, a large amount of semantically marked up content contributed by users, plus a a large and important portfolio of semantic web patents and patent applications.

We engaged in many months of M&A discussions with multiple industry-leading companies, and received strong interest, went through due-diligence, and got several offers, but we were running out of cash. When you have little or no cash runway acquirers view it as a firesale and so the offers we got were low-ball offers.

In a last ditch attempt to extend our runway, and improve our chances of getting a better deal done, I personally bridged the company along with several other white knights among our investors. But it just wasn’t enough to buy us the time we needed. We simply had no runway and thus no negotiating leverage.

And so due to terms and deadlines of various offers we had in hand, it was our fiduciary duty to sell the company to Evri, a company owned by one of our investors, Paul Allen. This deal resulted in the lowest risk, best outcome for our stakeholders compared to the other options we had.

But as a result of the terms of the sale, myself and the other Radar Networks shareholders and investors got washed out. We did not break even or profit from the sale in any way, by any standard, in any dimension. So who benefited? The lawsuit alleges that Radar and our Board members and I somehow benefited from the sale to Evri, but that is just not true and it’s easy to prove that.

Still, while this was not the kind of exit that I or my investors had hoped for, and we didn’t benefit from it personally or collectively, in those days, at the peak of the recession when companies were folding left and right, it was not as bad as it could have been.

We at least avoided a shutdown, were able to return some money to creditors. As a result of the deal, the technology would go forward and we believed our users and their data would transition smoothly. And many of our staff got jobs at Evri, which was important. As for myself, while I advised Evri temporarily to help with the transition, I have not had any involvement with them since.

That’s the end of the story. Some ventures don’t work out and when that happens nobody is happy.

One More Detail

Regarding the lawsuit brought by one of our investors. The situation is slightly more complex than a typical shareholder lawsuit, because in this case, the investor in question also became a client of the company in a later phase of our relationship, when we agreed to work together on a joint data visualization initiative, in concert with a second investment from her.

For this project, we worked closely with her, in partnership with several highly-regarded design firms that she approved, and we delivered excellent software that met the agreed specifications. Unfortunately this investor/client is not happy with that project.

I’m truly saddened that this investor/client has decided to go down the path of filing this highly questionable lawsuit. It cannot result in anything but waste in the end.

But, in light of all the facts and evidence we have, I and all our respective legal counsels, are confident that we will prevail on the merits, if we have to go to court. The allegations in the lawsuit just don’t hold water.

What I’ve Learned

It was an indescribably painful process to lose my company – a company I spent nearly a decade pouring blood, sweat and tears into. It felt like losing a child. And as an intensely loyal person, it was also especially difficult to feel like I had disappointed people I truly cared about and wanted to deliver value to.

But while failures are painful, they can also be some of the most fruitful learning experiences. And I would like to share some of that with you.

First of all, one of the many things I learned (the hard way), is that even doing everything correctly and ethically, with the best intentions, great investors, a great team, and with the best legal counsel, isn’t always enough to keep yourself from getting sued by a disgruntled shareholder.

Anyone can file a lawsuit, and allege anything they want in it, regardless of what turns out to be true or not. And it happens all the time. The only thing that is important is the truth that comes out in court.

But that’s just the beginning. I’ve learned about humility, about failure, about ways things can go wrong, and about what it’s like to go through selling at a loss, and a lawsuit. None of these things were really lessons I wanted to learn. But they’re probably important lessons nonetheless.

It was a major blow when I first found out about the lawsuit. I have to admit I felt very depressed about it; the allegations were upsetting because I so completely disagree with them, they are so far from the truth, and so personally hurtful.

But at least, from what I’ve learned from this so far, I’ve put together a few tips for entrepreneurs that could help them protect themselves from this kind of situation: 10 Survival Tips for Entrepreneurs That Nobody Likes to Talk About.

Thanks for listening, and thanks for all of your support, both in the past, and now. I really appreciate it. Especially as I’m going through this challenging and experience.

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

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.

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