10 Semantic Apps to Watch - One Year Later
In November 2007, we listed and reviewed 10 promising Semantic Web apps. A lot can happen in one year on the Internet, so we thought we'd check back in with each of the 10 products and see how they're progressing. What's changed over the past year and what are these companies working on now? The products are, in no particular order: Freebase, Powerset, Twine, AdaptiveBlue, Hakia, Talis, TrueKnowledge, TripIt, Calais (was ClearForest), Spock.
In our next post in this series, we're going to publish a completely new list of Semantic apps to watch! That's right, 10 more Semantic apps. Let us know your suggestions in the comments.
Freebase
Freebase is an open, semantically marked up database of information. It looks similar to Wikipedia, but Freebase is all about structured data and what you can do with it.
Freebase has been one of the more hyped companies in Semantic Web, leading to some skepticism that the product is too much like Wikipedia and offers nothing much new. In May '08, we attempted to dispel the Freebase skepticism. Our conclusion was that the structured database, API, creative commons licensing - among other things - all added up to a richer product than Wikipedia. Then in July, we reported that Freebase was about to hit 4 million topics in its collection - which at the time was 60% more than the English Wikipedia.
However, we noted some concerns with Freebase - "big gaps in the data" along with usability issues. In a follow-up article in August, we covered an interesting tool for browsing Freebase, called Freebase Parallax. Unfortunately, when we tried out a number of searches in Parallax, very few subjects were well populated.
RWW verdict one year later: still lots of work to do for Freebase, in terms of usability and useful data.
Calais (was ClearForest)
When we did our round-up one year ago, ClearForest had been recently acquired by Reuters and at that point it had a Web Service and a Firefox extension. What a change a year brings! ClearForest went on to release Calais, a toolkit of products that enable users to incorporate semantic functionality within their blog, content management system, website or application.
Since launching the Open Calais API early this year, over 6,000 developers have registered with it and the service is doing more than 1 million transactions a day. We wrote about the launch of Calais' easiest-to-use service yet, called SemanticProxy, at the end of September. Version 3.0 was released earlier this month and version 4 is expected by January 09.
RWW verdict one year later: Calais has really blossomed over the past year and it is one of the most promising Semantic services around today. We can't wait to see what's next!
Powerset
Powerset (see our initial coverage here and here) is a natural language search engine. It's fair to say that Powerset has had a great 2008, having been acquired by Microsoft in July this year.
At the time of the acquisition, Powerset said that it needed a bigger partner to expand its product beyond its current state of only searching Wikipedia - something we had speculated about when the rumors of the acquisition first appeared. In its own statement, Microsoft stressed how useful Powerset's technology will be for improving Microsoft's own search products and to "take Search to the next level." In our analysis of the deal, we noted that it was a "bold play requiring exact execution" by Microsoft. We thought it was doubtful that Microsoft bought the company just to enhance Live Search - although in September Microsoft did just that. Possibly the plan is to replicate the Wikipedia solution, then incorporate Powerset into Internet Explorer.
RWW verdict one year later: successful acquisition for Powerset, bold one for the acquirer Microsoft. Can't wait to see what Microsoft does with it!
Twine
Definitely one of the more controversial of the Semantic apps we've covered on ReadWriteWeb. At launch last year, Twine claimed to be the first mainstream Semantic Web app. The company's founder Nova Spivack hasn't been shy to talk the product up even more over the past year. Version 1.0 of Twine was launched late October. At that time Spivack told us that Twine had 500,000 unique visitors in its closed beta, of which 50,000 are currently "active" (a user who visits the Twine site at least once per month). There were 20,000 'twines' at that point, with 1 million pieces of content having been added to the system.
Those statistics are OK for a relatively young beta, however Twine has also been beset by usability and performance issues in its beta period. In March we summed it up with a post entitled: Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype.
RWW verdict one year later: still far from mainstream and reviews have been disappointing user experience has been an issue over the past year. Struggling to find its niche.
Update: Some people have pointed out in comments and via email that many reviews of Twine have been positive. We agree and so we've struck out that line and clarified our position - that user experience has been the main issue.
Hakia
Hakia is a search engine focusing on natural
language processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results. Hakia attempts to
analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence
analysis. Over the past year Hakia has been busy extending its reach - licensing its proprietary OntoSem technology to other companies in March and announcing a Semantic API in June. It also released a social network of sorts, called h-Club.
RWW verdict one year later: Hakia has made good progress getting its technology into the hands of third parties. It's a steep challenge taking on Google though.
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Semantic technology is used in a big way in News.
What about Evri, Daylife, silobreaker & inform.com?
Great list! I'm personally a big fan of Glue by AdaptiveBlue, although it still has some quirks. Semantic power should meet utility and in that regard, I really like Juice, the contextual plugin by Linkool Labs that Rick Toruczy covered here on ReadWriteWeb.
Spock died in Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan. He was re-born in Star Trek III - The Search for Spock. Coincidence?
Everything about semantics is exciting, but an application/concept can only survive and succeed if it is different and useful. Workarounds or alternatives for existing applications won't go a long way. I strongly feel that apps like freebase cannot survive by just presenting the wikipedia idea in a more structured manner. Moreover, for a full article on a subject i still have to go to wikipedia.
Good write up. I am a big fan of Calais and their model, and have been impressed by the set of APIs they're exposing for others to build on top of their service. Some of the listed players, though, have sadly over-promised and under-delivered (Twine for example).
In the opposite category (the not-so-famous-cooking-something-amazing), I would recommend watching proximic (http://www.proximic.com), a startup working on the next generation of semantic engines, with a technology based on mathematical pattern matching algorithms which already shows amazing promises.
Great list.
BTW:I have capture these websites snapshot according your post:
http://www.sitegif.com/gif/10-promising-semantic-web-apps-from-readwriteweb/
Take a look at this...
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twine.com+freebase.com+opencalais.com/?metric=uv
This article seems a bit out of synch with reality.
If you look at the category, Adaptive Blue and Twine are the two most popular apps with end-users. Both have traction and both are way ahead of the other companies cited in terms of usability and adoption.
Compete.com shows the following stats:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twine.com+freebase.com+opencalais.com/?metric=uv
Yet, despite this, the article paints a negative picture of both apps. Adaptive Blue does have repeat users. And the article cites negative reviews of Twine when in fact, perhaps the only negative review, out of hundreds of positive reviews, was published by this same blog.
It seems the article is really written by and for developers as it seems to favor apps that are focused on developers, like Calais, Freebase and Talis.
Nothing wrong with writing from a developer perspective. But the author should be clear about that bias.
I like www.kreeo.com, it addresses some real issues related to productivity and knowledge sharing. By far the best UI and usability I have seen on web, will be going beta soon
Was part of the RWW sramana mitra round table also
"commenter" (comment #8), I can tell you there's no developer bias. Of course though if you do a comparison of an API provider with two consumer apps you will see the websites of the consumer apps are much more traffiked. The whole point of an API after all is that third party websites can tap into their data *without* having to go to a consumer facing website. So your Compete graph really is meaningless, comparing Twine/AB to OpenCalais.
Also, while I agree that both Twine and AB have traction, I would argue against the following statement in regards to Twine: "...both are way ahead of the other companies cited in terms of usability". Usability is precisely the issue that Twine has had most problems with in its beta.
I do think I need to add a "more" to my statement about repeat users for AB. You are right that it probably has a lot of repeat users already (I am one of them).
Re Twine, despite the negative portrayal, I do genuinely have a soft spot for that product. I don't use it as much as I thought I
Richard (MacManus), when it comes to Twine, I, too, "genuinely have a soft spot for that product. I don't use it as much as I thought I would when it launched, but I do like the general concept and I really hope they can nail it in the near future." You may recall that I'm the Twine private beta user who most vocally came to Twine's defense, including in Marshall's generally negative review of Twine in this very blog.
At one point, I was so bullish about Twine that I convinced our de facto Western nations Chamber of Commerce in Qingdao (China) to give it a try. Alas, we collectively agreed to stop using it a couple/few months ago, after a trial of several months. Way too many complaints ... and I was tired of taking the heat. Key problem, as you suggested: Usability.
My guess -- and it's just a guess, although based upon over one year using Twine -- is that they've nailed scalability issues (although they've had scalability issues with my personal account; I probably still have the most connections on Twine and this has caused me a lot of headaches) and that their semweb engine is pretty good. But they need a total redesign when it comes to the UI (and UX, in general). I think that RN is in somewhat of a denial mode when it comes to their UI/UX. It's like they have no idea how awful it really is. Time for some focus groups, I guess. And, of course, a fresh, new team of usability and user experience design experts wouldn't hurt, either.
However, my biggest complaint about Twine is that I was putting way too much (mostly time) into it, and getting very little out of it. In other words, I rarely discovered very much in the way of interesting content via Twine. Maybe a few items each day, but not very much. Although I'm not a fan of AideRSS, I can see where it has a lot of utility for certain people. (I'm not among this cohort group, however.) I tend to get much, much more from FeedHub. FeedHub does help me manage the nearly 2,000 feeds that I receive. My day job is in the solar power sector, and one FeedHub feeds does a great job aggregating the best content from all sorts of "green" blogs that often have little to add that's relevant to me. (Solar power is just one form of renewable energy and my issues within solar are focused mostly upon three different categories: Standard modules, concentrating PV, and off-grid. Hence, the typical "green" blog may publish something relevant to one of these three categories quite infrequently.) My "passion" is still *security: Internet security, network security, computer security; malware, hacking, you name it. FeedHub helps me get my arms around this, too. (My FeedHub infosec feed is noted on my blog ... a blog that I hope I can find time for someday. But the news items are automatically updated, and all the news items are culled from my FeedHub aggregated feed.)
How does all of this translate to Twine? Easy: Twine needs critical mass in subject areas, but woefully lacks it. Some areas are covered better than others, but overall, coverage sucks. I encouraged their CEO to work with affinity groups like professional societies, but he didn't buy into this. I had offered to "float" Twine at this year's DEFCON during my WarGames interview and during our "Race to Zero" contest review session. Well, perhaps the idea of 7,500 hackers on Twine wasn't something that he was up to. OK, I can see his point.
However, somehow, someway, Twine has to provide much more value than it currently does. I have a lot of suggestions, like building subject matter "expertise" as suggested above, but it's really up to the folks at RN to come up with the appropriate solutions.
Spock botched their launch by performing an awesome media blitz and then discovering that they could not handle the load. I'm guessing that they are still reeling from this missing opportunity. At least we can learn from that lesson...
I think much of this work into semantic web structures will eventually move to the cloud as applications and we will learn to request structured queries or a voice app will allow us to ask natural lang queries and translate these into structured queries.
Either way semantically structured databases in the cloud will be the norm in a few years.
Off to try Calais. Thanks for keeping this list upto date
Hi Richard,
This is an excellent anniversary review. Semantic Web has gradually entered mainstream. Though still slowly, it progresses.
About the new Semantic Web applications in this past new year, I would like to recommend Imindi.
Imindi is actually an untraditional Semantic Web service, or we may call it a new take of Semantic Web. In tradition, Semantic Web services focus on employing machines to understand better humans. By contrast, Imindi's semantic web approach is to encourage humans to understand better each other via machines. Though both thoughts aim to understand better of human semantics (hence both are semantic web services), Imindi approaches the goal in a fairly different (untraditional) aspect.
Imindi believes that it might be too difficult to directly implement intelligent machine agents that can well understand human semantics. By contrast, the success of Web 2.0 has shown that we humans are capable of and willing to help each other if only we have been given proper services to perf
Yes, the guys at Imindi do deserve a shout out. They got some tough love at Techcrunch 50 where they appeared as finalists but they weren`t interested in the future (Twitter clone Yammer won) because Imindi is the future.
http://imindi.com/
http://blog.imindi.com/
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/imindi
http://www.mahalo.com/Imindi
Hi Richard,
I'm sorry to hear that you got an error while trying to sign up at True Knowledge, did you try recently or was this a while ago?
If you would still like to test out True Knowledge please let me know your email address and I'll send you an invite. This offer applies to all readers of ReadWriteWeb; if you want an invite to True Knowledge, email: community(at symbol)trueknowledge.com
True Knowledge is still under heavy development and the team has been growing very rapidly this year (I joined in February and since then the headcount has more than doubled). We are working towards opening up to a publicly available site next year.
Many thanks,
Nick Franklin (Community Manager - True Knowledge)
community(at symbol)trueknowledge.com
http://www.trueknowledge.com/
https://twitter.com/trueknowledge
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I agree with Arjun, your new list to watch should certainly include Inform and Evri, probably the ones to watch relative to news applications.
Yes, like Arjun and Steven said the news world is already a big semantic apps user. They mainly use it to improve navigation and stickiness, but also as content management tools. Some emerging semantic players have already being mentioned. I know that Nstein (http://www.nstein.com) also provides very interesting stuff in that domain.
What about Semantic MediaWiki? Hmm, OK, it is not really an application, and it is not created by some start up, but instead an Open Source tool to run your own semantic wiki -- and it is widely deployed. Just to name a few examples: semanticweb.org, discourseDB, or most prominent, Chickipedia (which has even more pageviews than most of the applications named here). And there are a number of companies offering hosting, be it Referata, ontoprise, or, most widely known, Wikia.
I'd like to see that more covered! And yes, being an SMW co-author, I am biased :)
great post...
I think you would love Semantinet, wrote a piece about them: http://www.nivcalderon.com/headup/
and here's a video: http://www.headup.com/video.html
As a developer using Calais, I confirm that it is a *great* service, for many reasons:
1) it lowers the barrier to adoption: You can start by using the end point which does simple entity extraction as a way to extract important terms from a snippet of text and grow over time to appreciate the full power of RDF.
2) it also lowers the barrier to adoption because it is a very simple service to use: you send some text and you get results back. So you can get a prototype up and running in a day or less.
3) Tom Tague who is the lead on the Reuters side is smart, technical and gets developers and developer-driven adoption.
My only wish at this point is for Google and Microsoft to get into this game too: this functionality is too important going forward to let a single player own it.
I've tried a bunch of products (Glue, Calais) and really like Headup, semantinet's (semantinet.com) product. Just having a quick-link everywhere is really convenient for me since it integrates seamlessly with my browsing experience.
Interesting roundup, this blog post and comments from a year ago on emerging semantics web might be an interesting read: http://yahooresearchberkeley.com/blog/2007/05/16/the-emerging-semantics-web-the-semantic-web-is-dead/
For the next roundup, suggest HeadUp (http://headup.com) as well, which helps discovery of new content by surfacing the semantic web in an user consumable way.
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like Arjun and Steven said the news world is already a big semantic apps user.
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I agree with Arjun, your new list to watch should certainly include Inform and Evri, probably the ones to watch relative to news applications.
Specifically for browser based semantics I wonder how they will continue to grow... I think the intelligent browser is a phenomenal experience but it scares be a bit as a business model. Unless these companies can repeat their product across many browsers I think they are limiting their reach quite a bit. Or maybe thats ok.
As Chrome improves I see a huge portion of people moving to it from FF3. Are these companies thinking that they are going to stay with FF3 mostly or branch out?
i think you can add hibernater (hibernater.com) in, its promising, with the ability to reduce time wasted on saving and resuming your work.