Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses on ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
Everyone, including possibly even the Google+ team, is currently thinking that Google+ is a Twitter and Facebook competitor. But I think in fact, Google+ is for something entirely different. Google+ is not really for socializing; it’s for sharing knowledge. That’s what makes it different from other social networks. It supports more flexible access permissions on [...]
In previous articles, I’ve written about how Google+ can build a developer ecosystem on Chrome that is different from Twitter’s ecosystem, and how Twitter must change to survive against that. It’s clear that Google+ and Twitter are very different animals. Now what about Facebook? Should Facebook be worried about Google+? Are Facebook and Google+ really [...]
As a result of the emergence of Google+, Twitter could soon find itself in a tough spot. A large chunk of their core developer base might migrate to Google+ because there is simply more opportunity there. Why? Well for starters, it’s really easy to crank out Chrome extensions and you can market and sell them [...]
Google+ has seen some good initial uptake from early-adopters in its first few weeks. But how will it leverage developers and partners? In order to really build value around Google+, of course Google will integrate it with their other products, including Search, Gmail, and more. That will get it in front of a lot of [...]
I was recently interviewed by Stephen Ibaraki and Alex Lin (CEO of ChinaValue) in what turned out to be the most interesting, far-reaching, and multi-disciplinary (and long) interview I’ve ever given. I was very pleased with the depth of their questions and the topics we covered. You can listen to the MP3 version here, or [...]
TechCrunch kindly ran my most recent article today — the full version is available here. Here is an excerpt: I’ve been puzzling over Twitter’s recent tactical moves around their API, Ubermedia and Tweetdeck, for a few months now, and it just doesn’t add up. In fact I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in [...]
I was recently honored to be invited by President Sarkozy of France to participate in the e-G8 Summit — a new and potentially useful summit of global Internet leaders, right before this year’s G8 Summit in Paris. This event will bring together Internet leaders and political leaders, for two days of discussions about the Internet. [...]
It’s been a busy week for the team at bottlenose one of my coolest venture productions. Bottleno.se has developed a very powerful new personalization system that is optimized for making sense of Twitter and other real-time information streams. The product is in alpha and invite beta is planned for June. It began when TechCrunch broke [...]
I’m pleased to announce that my newest venture production is beginning to unstealth. It’s called The Daily Dot and it promises to be “the hometown newspaper of the Web ” — the community newspaper for Web. The story of The Daily Dot began several years ago when I was thinking about where the Web was [...]
Yesterday’s acquisition by CBS of Clicker is great news for one of my ventures, Live Matrix. It shows that what Live Matrix is doing is becoming even more valuable. But that’s just the beginning of the story — Live Matrix is fundamentally different from Clicker. It targets a different, and possibly larger, opportunity. Clicker bills [...]
My father, Mayer Spivack, passed away on February 12, 2011, in the Kaplan Family House, a beautiful hospice outside of Boston. He passed away, at the young age of 74, after a difficult year and a half battle with colon cancer. During his illness he never lost his spirit of childlike curiosity, enormous compassion, and [...]
I’m soon headed to Amsterdam to keynote the SIBOS conference. SIBOS is the largest annual banking conference in the world, attracting around 10,000 attendees. But what’s most interesting about this event is the innovation stream within the conference. It’s called the Innotribe and is focused on exploring and innovating the future of financial services. This [...]
(Note: Thanks to Gigaom for posting up an excerpted version of this post. I also wanted to share the longer version below for those interested.) ——————————- Introduction The shape of Web 3.0 has finally emerged in the realization of the Stream, something I and others have written about extensively. Twitter and Facebook, among others, through their [...]
Please vote for these SXSW Panels: (voting closed August 27) What We Really Want In Web TV Banking on Big Brands/Celebs for the Web Humans Versus Robots: Who Curates the Real-Time Web? The Future of Conferences: Designing Experiences Social Viewing for Fan Engagement at MTV Anatomy of an Online Video Show 500 People in Your [...]
I am not advocating charging for content online, however, it may be a necessary evil for some content providers to survive. Without subscription revenues the newspaper industry is dying. The same is true for magazine publishers. Online content providers face similar challenges – the cost of doing high-quality editorial is high and the revenues from [...]
Kate Ray has done a terrific job illustrating and explaining Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web in her new documentary. She interviews, Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, me, and many others. If you’re interested in where the Web is headed, and the challenges and opportunities ahead, then you should watch this, and share it too!
I have started blogging about a new concept that I call The Scheduled Web. The Scheduled Web is the next evolution of the Real-Time Web, in which it will become possible to actually navigate the time dimension of the Web more productively. There is a popular misconception that on-demand content, such as archived video, is [...]
If 2010 was the year of the Real-Time Web, then 2011 is going to be the year that it evolves into the Scheduled Web. The Real-Time Web happens in the now: it is spontaneous, overwhelming, and disorganized. Things just happen unpredictably and nobody really knows what to expect or what will happen when. The Real-Time [...]
We exist in a epoch of great technological change. Within the space of just a few generations we have gone from horse drawn carriages to exploring the outer reaches of our solar system, from building with wood, stone and metals to nanoscale construction with individual atoms, and from manual printing presses and physical libraries, to [...]
Today I am announcing that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here. This acquisition consolidates two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of a long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web. [...]
The human brain is like an archaeological record. Different layers and functional areas have evolved outwards over time. And now a new layer is evolving. I propose we call this new layer of the brain “the metacortex.” (Note: Metacortex also happens to be the company that Neo worked for in the movie, The Matrix) The [...]
Sneak Preview of Siri – The Virtual Assistant that will Make Everyone Love the iPhone, Part 2: The Technical Stuff In Part-One of this article on TechCrunch, I covered the emerging paradigm of Virtual Assistants and explored a first look at a new product in this category called Siri. In this article, Part-Two, I interview [...]
Barney Pell invited me to a dinner tonight for the founders, funders, and friends of Singularity University tonight at the NASA Ames campus. I’ve been following the progress of the initiative for some time, via Peter Diamandis, who I’ve known since I attended the International Space University program in 1992. Singularity University brings together luminaries [...]
“All reality is virtual” — Terrence McKenna This is Part II of my article “The Global Brain is About to Wake Up” — about the realtime Web and how it relates to the emerging Global Brain. Here I focus mainly on thorny philosophical and scientific speculations about the nature of consciousness, the role it plays [...]