Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

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

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

This is a series of screenshots that demo the latest build of the consumer experience and developer tools for Twine.com’s “T2″ semantic search product. This is still in internal alpha — not released to public yet.
Twine T2 Demo & Dev Tools (Screenshots Series)
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This is the story of Twine.com — our early research (with never before seen screenshots of our early semantic desktop work), and our evolution from Twine 1.0 towards Twine 2.0 (“T2″) which is focused on semantic search.
A Yarn About Twine — ISWC 2009 Keynote — Nova Spivack
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This is a talk I have given many times, on the past, present and future evolution of the Web, and particularly the Semantic Web.

Web Evolution Nova Spivack Twine
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The next generation of Web search is coming sooner than expected. And with it we will see several shifts in the way people search, and the way major search engines provide search functionality to consumers.
Web 1.0, the first decade of the Web (1989 – 1999), was characterized by a distinctly desktop-like search paradigm. The overriding [...]

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 [...]

Twine has been growing at 50% per month since launch in October. We've been keeping that quiet while we wait to see if it holds. VentureBeat just noticed and did an article about it. It turns out our January numbers are higher than Compete.com estimates and February is looking strong too. We have a slew [...]

In this interview with Fast Company, I discuss my concept of "connective intelligence." Intelligence is really in the connections between things, not the things themselves. Twine facilitates smarter connections between content, and between people. This facilitates the emergence of higher levels of collective intelligence.
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UPDATE: There’s already a lot of good discussion going on around this post in my public twine.
I’ve been writing about a new trend that I call “interest networking” for a while now. But I wanted to take the opportunity before the public launch of Twine on Tuesday (tomorrow) to reflect on the state of this [...]

Video from my panel at DEMO Fall ‘08 on the Future of the Web is now available.
I moderated the panel, and our panelists were:
Howard Bloom, Author, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc.
Jon Udell, Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
Prabhakar Raghavan, PhD, Head of Research and [...]

I have made a screencast that teaches you how to get started using Twine, and explains most of the features, best-practices for using it, and where we are headed with the product. You can read more about it and discuss it with me here.
For anyone who is new to Twine, this will be really [...]

I just posted an article on how bookmarking is evolving, in response to the discussion about "Who Bookmarks Anymore?" that I found on Techmeme. Del.icio.us was a start. Twine is taking it somewhere new. Read about it on my public twine, here.
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Melissa Pierce is a filmmaker who is making a film about "Life in Perpetual Beta." It’s about how people who are adapting and reinventing themselves in the moment, and a new philosophy or approach to life. She’s interviewed a number of interesting people, and while I was in Chicago recently, she spoke with me as [...]

Here is the full video of my talk on the Semantic Web at The Next Web 2008 Conference. Thanks to Boris and the NextWeb gang!
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John Mills, one of the engineers behind Twine, recently wrote up an interesting article discussing our approach to semantic tags. It’s a good read for folks who think about the Semantic Web and tags.
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I have been thinking a lot about social networks lately, and why there are so many of them, and what will happen in that space.
Today I had what I think is a "big realization" about this.
Everyone, including myself, seems to think that there is only room for one big social network, and it looks like [...]

This is a brief post with one purpose: to clarify the meaning of the term "semantic." It has suddenly become chic to label every new app as somehow "semantic" but what does this mean really? Are all "semantic" apps part of the "Semantic Web?" What is the criteria for something to be "semantic" versus "Semantic [...]

This is a video of my talk at the Digital Now conference in Orlando yesterday. There’s a long intro by Don Dea, and then I speak (starting at index 05:14) about the Semantic Web and Twine.
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If you are interested in hearing about how some users are using the Twine invite-only beta test, here is a great article about why one user migrated to Twine from del.icio.us.
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I was pleasantly surprised to see a very nice fan video for Twine created by a high-school student who is in our beta test. It gives the flavor of Twine and is really nice.

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This is a five minute video in which I was asked to make some predictions for the next decade about the Semantic Web, search and artificial intelligence. It was done at the NextWeb conference and was a fun interview.

Learning from the Future with Nova Spivack from Maarten on Vimeo.
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Tim Berners-Lee just posted his thoughts about the importance of Linked Data on the Semantic Web. Linked data support is built-into Twine. All the data in Twine is accessible as open-standard RDF and OWL today and will be accessible to other applications via several API’s including SPARQL. You can learn more about Twine’s support for [...]

This week we began letting the second wave of beta users into the Twine invite-only beta. It’s been a very busy and exciting time for the Twine team. I’ll be providing more detailed stats on an ongoing basis in a few weeks once we have more data to analyze. For now, I will just provide [...]

The Beginning of the Mainstream Semantic Web?
It is being reported that Yahoo will be indexing a wide array of structured metadata, including Semantic Web metadata. This will make Yahoo’s search index potentially better than Google’s, although it will also open their index up to sophisticated attempts to “game the system” as well that will need [...]

I want to remind everyone, TWINE IS A BETA. It is only a beta. Beta means not finished, under development, work in progress, construction site, imperfect, open to feedback, undergoing testing, getting better everyday, in need of more work, etc. and many other things that are not synonymous with “finished” or “ready for consumer launch.” [...]

UPDATE: I posted some further notes on the fact that Twine is in beta, and what “beta” actually means and why we are in beta here.
Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a critical review of Twine today that identified several known issues the team is working on. These are points well-taken — we certainly understand that Twine is [...]

Special offer to readers of my blog…
There are now well over 30,000 users in the queue to get into the Twine beta. We’re going to start letting people in from the waiting list in waves and it should take about a month or two to let everyone in.
But what good is a waiting list if [...]

Carla Thompson, an analyst for Guidewire Group, has written what I think is a very insightful article about her experience participating in the early-access wave of the Twine beta.
We are now starting to let the press in and next week we will begin to let waves of people in from our over 30,000 user [...]

I’m here at the BlogTalk conference in Cork, Ireland with a range of bloggers and technologists discussing the emerging social Web. Including myself, Ian Davis and Paul Miller from Talis, there are also a bunch of other Semantic Web folks including Dan Brickley, and a group from DERI Galway.
Over dinner a few of us were [...]