Google News released its own official Facebook app today. Users can view the feeds of major topics by default and keyword searches for news in a full canvas page. News stories can be shared with friends easily, notes can be added, and there's tabs to view stories shared by and with friends. There's no profile page component, it's all just canvas page display.
It's not bad at all, though I still believe the real gold in Facebook is in the user's home page and minifeed - where never an outside app is seen. Profile pages just aren't where you interact with your apps and a dedicated canvas page seems likely to receive even less attention.
I'm here at the Semantic Edge panel at the Summit, moderated by Tim O'Reilly and featuring W. Daniel Hillis (Co-Chairman and CTO, Applied Minds), Barney Pell (Founder and CEO of Powerset), Nova Spivack (Twine - see our review here). The panel starts with demos from each of the three speakers.
Daniel Hillis starts with a demo of Freebase, which aims to "open up the silos of data and the connections between them". Freebase is a database that has all kinds of data in it and an API. He shows a wagon wheel like UI of VCs, centered around John Doerr. He says it is basically objects and relationships between them. Because it's an open database, anyone can enter new data in Freebase. An example page in the Freebase db looks pretty similar to a Wikipedia page (or a Twine page). When you enter new data, the app can make suggestions about content. The topics in Freebase are organized by type, and you can connect pages with links, semantic tagging. So in summary, Freebase is all about shared data and what you can do with it.
The now-EBay property StubHub has lost a battle in court and handing over the names of 13,000 of its users to the New England Patriots American football team. The suit was filed last November - two months before the acquisition of the site was announced, so it probably didn't go down like some of the YouTube suits.
It's never a good day when almost any website is forced to disclose the names of its users.
There are, by some accounts, about 3 billion mobile phone users in the world. That's more than the number of automobiles, more than the number of personal computers, more than the number of landline phones, more than the number of TVs, and more than the number of credit cards. The mobile Internet, however, has largely been a rather uninspiring experience. While many people, mostly in the developing world, use their mobile phone as their primary Internet or computing device, the mobile web is often looked at as a jungle of slow loading pages, poor design, and unoptimized content that is a pain to use on a tiny screen.
In the US there are 237 million wireless subscribers, but only 32 million accessed the Internet in September -- a tiny fraction of the 210 million total Internet users. Compared to Japan, where just 100,000 less people accessed the mobile web than did people log on from a personal computer, it is clear that in the US using a mobile phone for web access is not yet a mainstream activity.
Last night we covered the announcement of Twine, which aims to be the first mainstream Semantic Web application. Twine founder Nova Spivack showed me a demo of the new app, which he described as a "knowledge networking" application. One of the things I asked Nova right at the end of the interview was his definition of "Web 3.0", a term he has been using in his blog.
While people are (rightly) skeptical of another version number for the Web, I thought Nova's definition was a useful one. He told me that web 2.0 "is a decade and not a technology" - and that it's more about defining the character of each era, rather than trying to define a Web era as a set of technologies. So in those terms, he said web 2.0 = social web and that web 3.0 will be the "intelligent web". By that he means that apps are getting smarter, because data is getting smarter. It's clear he was referring to the Semantic Web - his company is based on those technologies.
Microsoft has lifted the lid this week on a number of products that compete to various degrees with popular Google services. While Google fans and blogosphere cynics have derided the Microsoft offers as "me too" knock-offs, at first look Microsoft 411 and Live Workspace look really nice. Virtual Earth 6.0 also has a "newly open" SDK and the Popfly mashup engine also made its first appearance this week.
Much of this may be following in Google's footsteps - but fact of the matter, it could end up being better than what the search giant has already brought to market.
For those of you who couldn't pay $4000 to get into Web 2.0 Summit - or didn't want to - the organizers have started to release videos of the main sessions on blip.tv. Below is the Mark Zuckerberg session (the Mary Meeker one is also online).
Some quick thoughts on Web 2.0 Summit this year from my experience: similar to last year, business focus, Facebook is the hottest topic, there are iPhones everywhere. There aren't that many new startup ventures around, although Nova Spivack's Twine is promising. Overall the show hasn't been as interesting to me as Web 2.0 Expo was in April, but it is a different audience (Expo is more geek focused). I'll wrap up my thoughts on the Summit later today. Meanwhile here is the video:
It was 1995 and C++ was the language of choice for building large-scale
software systems. C++ was a powerful object-oriented programming language, the
successor of widely used procedural language called C. But not only was C++
powerful, it was also quite complicated. Seasoned programmers enjoyed the intricacies and
the possibilities, but newbies would get burned after the first
mishandled copy constructor.
Enter Java - a language of great elegance, power and, most importantly, simplicity. Designed by James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems, Java became a phenomenon that won hearts and minds, changed the rules of enterprise programming and seriously wounded Microsoft. Yet despite its glory, Java lost one of the most important battles - the battle for the web browser. In this post we look at what happened to Java in the last decade, from its glorious rise, to market politics, to the battle for the browser.
On Friday Radar Networks is announcing a new Semantic Web application called Twine. Founder Nova Spivack showed me a demo today of the new app, which he described as a "knowledge networking" application. It has aspects of social networking, wikis, blogging, knowledge management systems - but its defining feature is that it's built with Semantic Web technologies. Spivack told me that Twine aims to bring a usable and scalable interface to the long-promised dream of the Semantic Web.
Spivack went as far as to claim that Twine will be "the first mainstream Semantic Web application" - and it's certainly fair to say that we've heard lots of theory about the Semantic Web ever since Tim Berners-Lee defined it, but as yet there have been very few large scale success stories (if any). Will Twine finally be the Semantic Web app that breaks through? Let's find out more...
First some background: Nova Spivack has an illustrious history in the Semantic Web and AI business, having worked for both AI legend Ray Kurzweil and tech guru Danny Hillis (Thinking Machines). The genesis for Twine, said Spivack, came from an R&D project about 5 years ago, which turned into a research project, then a Series A round with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2006. As of now the Twine team is 30 people working from San Francisco -- and they're finally ready to unveil their new mainstream Semantic Web product.
The aim of Twine is to enable people to share knowledge and information. At first glance it is very much like Wikipedia, but there is a whole lot more smarts to the system. Spivack described it to me as "knowledge networking"- i.e. it aims to connect people with each other "for a purpose". It's not based around socializing, but to share and organize information you're interested in. Using Twine, you can add content via wiki functionality (there are many post types), you can email content into the system, and "collect" something (as an object, e.g. a book object). The screenshots below show of this in action -- note that the product itself isn't available just yet, as it's in private testing.
Though the name was only officially registered in the mid-90s, perhaps the most famous brand of notebooks in the world is Moleskine, who have been endorsed by writers like Neil Gaiman and Bruce Chatwin, and whose makers famously brag were used by Vincent Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Earnest Hemingway, and Henri Matisse. Whether those art and literary luminaries every actually used Moleskine notebooks or not, they remain massively popular with artists and writers today (my most artistic friends swear by them).
But how many thousands of artists toil away in their oilcloth-covered cardboard notebooks, producing great masterpieces that are never seen? How many unknown talents are creating amazing piece of art in these tiny notebooks everyday? The Moleskine Project, which launched on October 8th, aims to discover some of these hidden gems of the art world.
