Imagine a tiny little sun, just bursting with heat and light, but trapped inside a hard metal cover with a few holes to let beams of energy stream out from inside. Now imagine there were millions of those little suns, maybe the size of basketballs or tennis balls, all rolling down an assembly line one after another, each with a unique pattern of holes and beams of light streaming out into the world.
That's what Twitter is. Inside every unborn tweet you can find infinite potential - someone will be in a place, with social context and they will say something, anything, and give that potential a form. They will say something and it will be instantly available to anyone in the world who's subscribed. Each tweet has more than 30 fields of metadata under the hood; the value populating each of those fields makes up the unique patterns of holes in the metal cover that lets the light out from inside. A company launched today that lets you control a robot that drills holes in the metal covers trapping the infinite potential of the sun inside.
A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.
The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.
Twitter is cutting deals with third-party providers of services that re-syndicate Tweets online, the company announced today, and the first one is Austin, Texas-based Mass Relevance. Mass Relevance has access to the full Twitter fire hose and offers its customers a filtering, curation and display technology to add Tweets about a TV show, political campaign or other event to their web pages.
The potential for syndicated Tweets is big, but hopefully Twitter won't go after everyone else in the world who puts Tweets on other websites as a part of their business. The company doesn't seem to be welcoming interested parties to license those rights either. We've asked Twitter for comment on the prospect of enforcement of the prohibition against unofficial resyndication of Tweets (who said this stuff was free as the wind?) but haven't heard back from the company yet. (Update: Twitter's comment below.)
Google Calendar announced a new feature today called Suggested Times; it allows users to co-ordinate their available times to have a meeting together. I haven't got it turned on in my account yet, but there's a screenshot below. It looks ok. The description of how it works isn't at all clear in the announcement.
The idea is great, though: calendar data as the basis of new features. People say that your telephone contact list is your ultimate social network - and they say that your email inbox is a potent platform for potential products and services to be developed on top of. What about your calendar, though? The new Google Calendar feature is just the tip of the iceberg - so much more could be made possible if the data latent in our calendars were made programmatically available and turned into a platform for development. Like what? A few ideas are below, I'd love to learn about any other ideas you've got, too.
Location data provider GeoIQ today detailed a new offering called GeoIQ Social. This is a real-time streaming API that delivers location-enabled data from Twitter, Pachube-enabled sensor hardware and other platforms into a map-friendly output format that can be updated as the data changes. Boom!
Sentiment analysis, user ranking, data from sensors and potentially much more can all be taken into account in requesting data from the API. Connectors have been built for "all sorts of databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, HBase, and MongoDB as well as an even newer types of databases and APIs like Google Fusion Tables." Awesome.
Social data discovery API service Qwerly has been acquired by social marketing data provider Fliptop, the companies announced late last night. Qwerly was a European startup that allowed developers to provide information like a person's Twitter profile or email address and would then return links to their corresponding profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. In other words, it is a tool that helps you better understand the people you know, it points you to where they share their thoughts and experiences online, programmatically. (See: Qwerly Hopes to Power Rebel Alliance Against Facebook)
Fliptop, which acquired Qwerly, is a little written-about social media marketing platform that does similar things, just better, faster and with an explicit aim at marketers. Ultimately all beautiful things must bow down before the god of marketing; human communication has no meaning beyond the opportunity it provides for one person to sell something to another.
SimpleGeo, a much-watched location data provider lead by serial CEO Jay Adelson, has apparently proven unsuccessful in turning the incredible potential of its technology into a thriving standalone business. Today blogger Michael Arrington reports that the company has been acquired in an all-stock deal by fast-growing Portland, Oregon startup UrbanAirship.
UrbanAirship was born just a few short years ago, when a team of unemployed online bacon salesmen found out they could offer mobile push notifications and in-app sales functionality fast enough and cheap enough that brands all over the world would buy their service rather than build it themselves. That company grew fast and led by CEO Scott Kveton has apparently acquired SimpleGeo, a company led by an even more storied CEO, Jay Adelson of Equinix and Digg. Adelson has been at SimpleGeo for just under a year and there is no word yet about whether he'll be joining Airship.
A team of long-time leaders of the Internet community have come together behind Dan Whaley, one of the forefathers of contemporary search engines, to build a system called Hypothes.is: an "open-source Internet platform to crowdsource peer-review on information everywhere."
It's a peer review system to check, verify and critique content all over the Web - and beyond. "Improving the credibility of the information we consume is humanity's grandest challenge," Whaley says. Topic experts will be enlisted in addition to crowdsourcing, a reputation system, browser plug-ins and APIs are on the roadmap and all the data will be stored at the Internet Archive. It sounds incredible, and it's raising money on Kickstarter right now. The goal is for a prototype to be released in the first half of next year.
You make data. A lot of it. From Web browsing to link sharing to photos published online, from phone bills to medical records to online banking - almost all of us produce an incredible amount of electronic data that slips right through our fingers - often into the gaping maw of a corporate world without our best interests in mind.
What if you could easily capture all that data yourself, though? What if you could use it like fuel for apps built for you to view, sort and take action based on all that data? What if you could offer selective access to outside parties to that data? That's the vision behind the Locker Project, an open source personal data platform, and Singly, its corporate partner for hosted installs of the data lockers. Singly 1.0 launches to developers today at the Web 2.0 Summit (live at 2:40 PST). It's got financial backing from the leaders of WordPress, TechStars and multiple VC firms and a knock-out team of famous developers building it. What does it look like? Check out the first screen shots below.
Link shortening and social web analytics provider Bit.ly announced today the first Enterprise product built on top of its new search platform, a reputation tracking alert system. Unlike other social media monitoring services, Bit.ly says it will predict which brand-new pages online will receive a lot of traffic in the future. Thus what Bit.ly's customers should pay attention to.
How does it do that? How well does it perform? Some information and initial impressions are below.
