Why is it that with GPS applications being so advanced, we're still such a long way from the benefits of seamless transportation? It's doubtful that riders really care which transportation authorities are responsible for their trip. As a user, I want to be able to type in my home address and get inexpensive door-to-door transportation options to any destination in the world.

There's no reason this shouldn't exist. If transportation authorities standardized their data, aggregation services would have no problem mapping routes from Beijing to Belize.

Google Transit: Still one of the best services, Google Transit offers public transit directions in 412 cities. While the service is great for public transit options, it does not include private bus or shuttle services. This means that users can plan trips from San Francisco to Mountain View but they cannot plan trips to Los Angeles.

HopStop: HopStop currently offers public transportation route planning in New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington DC. Similar to the above two sites, HopStop still lacks the continuity to plan a cross-country excursion; however, it's a decent way to navigate one of the serviced cities. For those interested in exploring an area, HopStop allows you to choose destinations from a map. This means you can spontaneously pinpoint a body of water or town and travel towards it.

Public Routes: This service claims to offer directions via public transportation in 24 US states and 37 major cities. One nice feature is the ability to text transit directions to your phone.

City-Specific Services: For Bay Area visitors, 511.org allows users to plan trips utilizing bus, rail, ferry, shuttle and even Greyhound services. The inclusion of commercial bus carriers and dial-a-ride vans increases the scope of the service and visitors are able to plan trips all the way to Napa and back. New York's MTA NYC Transit offers a similar service. Meanwhile, Transport for London offers visitors a route planner for the tubes, buses, rail, riverboats and trams. Its mobile travel alerts service also offers news on delays and accidents.

People-Powered Projects: DIY City is one great group attempting to create transportation solutions across cities. The site administrators issue challenges and users respond with answers on how to create transportation solutions including distributed smart phone bus tracking systems and bar code tracking. The project exists in a number of countries. As RWW reported last week, Washington DC's Apps for Democracy also yielded a number of crowdsourced transportation-based apps.

If you've got links to great transportation applications or ideas on how we can improve transportation planning options, include them in your comments below.

Social Submission and Aggregation Yahoo Pipes

Social Site Submission Watch Dog
The Social Site Submission pipe allows you to keep track of all of your articles that are submitted to either Digg or Reddit. Just enter in your site url without the 'http://' (readwriteweb.com) and you'll receive a list of links of your site submissions along with the current number of Diggs your article has received. Grab the RSS feed to keep track of your site submissions.

Social Media Firehose
Search some of the most popular social media sites for brand, product, or keyword mentions with Social Media Firehose.

Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Slashdot mashup v2
Grab a filtered mashup of news from popular submission sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and del.icio.us.

Super Digg Feed v2.0
Receive configurable alerts for stories on Digg in specific categories or with a specified number of minimum diggs along with a host of information to help you decide what's hot and what's not in the Digg community.

Meta Search Alerts
Aggregate search results from Del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Google News, Icerocket, Live Search, Technorati, Yahoo News and more with Meta Search Alerts.

Content Keyword RSS
This pipe will search news sources from multiple sites such as Digg, Technorati, Yahoo News, PRWeb, and Google News, compare content to remove duplicates and output a unique RSS feed full of content related to your keywords.

FriendFeed Minus Twitter
Get the latest from your FriendFeed stream, without the noise from Twitter.

Twitter Feed without Replies
Grab this feed to import your Twitter stream into social aggregation sites such as FriendFeed without your replies to users.

Twitter Link Moniter
Want to keep track of all those great links that your followers on Twitter send out? The Twitter Link Monitor pipe does that for you. Simply enter your username and the pipe will instantly grab all that great content you just don't want to miss out on.

Friends Name Alphabetical
Interested in knowing how large the followings of your followers are on Twitter? This is just the pipe for you. Friends Name Alphabetical provides a list of who your following and how many people are following them. Just in case you ever want to be nosy.

RSSmeme's Filters
The best and only filter out there for Google Reader Shared Items aggregator RSSmeme. Keep track of how popular your favorite sources are or find some of the most popular stories on RSSmeme with this Yahoo Pipe creation.

Pricing Alert Yahoo Pipes - Catch That Deal!

eBay Simple Price Search
This Pipe was designed to search with a specified price range in eBay.com. Add your search terms along with your minimum amount and maximum amounts to keep up with the best deals on eBay.

Amazon, Craigslist and eBay price watcher
Save time tracking the best prices for an item on Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay with this pipe creation.

Amazon Item Search
Searches for items by keyword on amazon.com Get the title, price and in the description you get the average rating. When you link some product just click on its link and you will be on this Amazon's product page.

Netflix To Amazon
Takes your Netflix feed for movies at home and replace each item with the most relevant results found on Amazon. Description include an image, pricing, and more. Grab your Netflix userid by looking at your personalized feeds on Netflix.

Bestselling Books
Keep up with the Amazons bestselling booklist. This Yahoo Pipe creation is updated hourly to include the most popular books on Amazon.

Amazon Books: Movers and Shakers
Find out what books are hot and what's going out of style on Amazon with this Yahoo Pipe.

Amazon Books: Most Wished For
I could never find that perfect book for a family member or friend. If you're in the same boat, keep up with Amazon's most wished for books and opt to go with the crowd. At least if they don't like the book you can blame it on the majority of Amazon's customers.

Media Yahoo Pipes

New York Times through Flickr
Here's a unique way of looking at the New York Times via Flickr photos. Keywords for NYT's homepage are passed through various filters to find matching photos on Flickr.

Last.fm Recent Tracks + Youtube: Last.fm meets YouTube
Find the Youtube videos for your Last.fm playlist.

Favourite Artists News
Keep up with the latest news on the artists from your Last.fm favorite artists.

Recently Played Streamable Songs (Last.FM)
A list of recently played songs filtered to only include songs that are streamable on Last.FM

Muxtape Recommendations
Enter your Last.fm user name and this Pipe will find featured Muxtapes that include at least one track from a favorite artist of yours. The Pipe is a little buggy so you may need to run it a few times.

Free iTunes Downloads - Videos
Keep up-to-date with the latest free TV and video downloads available from the iTunes US Store.

Free iTunes Downloads - Songs
Want to know about the latest free song download available from the iTunes US Store? Grab the RSS feed of this pipe to keep up.

New Movie Trailers
Grab the latest movie trailers from iTunes mashed with their video counterparts on Youtube.

YouTunes Top 100
A clone of the popular YouTunes pipe, find the music videos of the top 100 songs on iTunes.

YouTube tags to RSS
Be alerted when videos on Youtube are tagged with specific keywords that you may be interested in watching.

Did We Miss Something

Yahoo! Pipes is the first GUI builder for the biggest database in the world, the Web itself. This list is far from complete, but it's comprised of the best Yahoo! Pipes creations available. If you have a creation or know of one that didn't make the list, leave a comment down below and we'll be sure to review it to keep growing our list.

TruCast allows companies to monitor internet buzz by analyzing blogs, social networks, consumer opinion and review sites, bulletin boards, discussion forums, newsgroups, and online news sites to determine what's being said and how engaged customers are with the company's brand. Several well-known companies currently using the TruCast system to monitor and respond to their customers include Dell, Microsoft, Panasonic, and Hormel.

Dell, who is known to be one of the more forward-thinking companies when it comes to listening and responding to their customers, uses TruCast to actively monitor posts, comments, and conversations on 40 different online topics related to the Dell brand, the details of which are revealed in this new case study which has been posted to the TruCast web site. According to the study, TruCast enabled Dell to reduce the negative sentiment about their brand by more than 50%.

TruCast 2.0

Now, with the launch of TruCast 2.0, the technology has been improved to monitor and discover even more online conversations than before. According to the company, TruCast now currently harvests and analyzes nearly 70% more data than any other competing applications. The technology they use delves into the social conversations that are taking place - reading through comments, follow-up comments, and more to determine the relevance and attitude of each item it finds.

TruCast Dashboard

More importantly, TruCast works with a business to give the right people inside the company the access to the relevant data in order to respond in a timely and appropriate fashion. And although the conversations are coming in from all over the internet, TruCast streamlines them into one central application where they can be tracked, read, and answered, which makes the workflow of brand analysis and response as simple to handle as checking your inbox for new mail.

TruCast Response Manager

If you want to learn more about how TruCast is helping companies stay on top of the ever-changing social media landscape, you can view this presentation (below) from the American Marketing Association's (AMA) Online Seminar:

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Jamie has an interesting title: Minister of Information, and his primary responsibility is to seed Freebase with information and ensure the quality of the data. According to Jamie, Freebase is "open shared database of the world's knowledge." This sounds the same as Wikipedia, but it is really quite different, because at the heart of Freebase are the ideas of semantics and openness via API.

Unlike Wikipedia, which is a free form database, Freebase is structured, where concepts and relationships are interlinked into a gigantic network or graph. Another important difference is that Freebase is all about its API. Any information contained inside the database is accessible and can be retrieved via queries. In addition, the data in Freebase is under a Creative Commons license - meaning that is readily exportable and useful by others.

When it comes to defining the meanings of things, Freebase is focused on community, with collective editing, attribution, and collaboratively built semantics. This last point is quite crucial - the founders of Freebase believe that meaning has to emerge from the collaboration between users. As such, Freebase is one of the first experiments of web-scale social contracts. The site is really focused on the notion that information is not encumbered by licenses and is free to use.

What is in Freebase Today?

Data comes into Freebase from many sources: Wikipedia, Flickr, the US Department of Commerce, Music Brainz, the USGS, SFMOMA, the US Exchange Commission, Chef Moz, and many other places. Right now the information is mostly about people and places, but the system is engineered to have a wide range of data types. As an example of "People" information, there is a lot of information in Freebase about artists along with their artwork and place in history. More esoteric types of information you might find in the database include airplanes, french cheese, tropical storms in the 90s, oil companies, and candies.

Freebase also contains lots of other kinds of data and has:

• 3.4 Million Subjects
• 750K People
• 450K Locations
• 50K Companies
• 40K Movies
• ... Over 1K Data Types with over 3K Properties

Data Representation in Freebase

While Freebase certainly has long way to go before it can claim completeness of information, its core idea of object representation and linking seems very solid. Each object in Freebase is unique. As more information comes into the system about an object, more links are created about it in the system. It is particularly interesting how Freebase establishes object identity and decides that two concepts (or subjects) are the same.

The diagram above illustrates the idea. When a new source of information is added to Freebase, it is parsed into entities and facts. The new information is then cleaned up and is merged with the existing system. But the merge only occurs if the system determines that the two bits of information are really about the same subject (in this case Leonardo Da Vinci). This is a powerful approach which allows Freebase to grow the knowledge around individual subjects. What is also interesting is that Freebase allows human editing to reconcile situations when the system is unable to automatically link the two concepts together.

Each permanent object in the system has a GUID - a unique identifier, something like this: #9202a8c040000064..... The identifier can be used to refer to the object via URL and via queries. In addition to the GUID, there are other ways to refer to the object, for example, http://www.freebase.com/view/en/leonardo_da_vinci. Beyond that, there are even other aliases, for example, you can refer to a public company by its stock ticker symbol. But regardless of the reference, the key point is that you end up with the same, unique node in the system.

Freebase also has the ability to create new domains and types that describe new concepts, for example, science fiction movies. There is a way to attach new data types to the existing domains, and then these types can be shared and used by other users. The idea is that you can model things with the fine grained resolution that you need and then you can invite people to help you refine and evolve your models. An example is the motorcycle community, which evolved out of an effort led by one guy and who was then joined by others, and has since been promoted to the top level. The community process is about merging private types to build common models.

What Can You Do With Freebase?

Freebase is not a formal system, it is not a reasoning engine, it is just a knowledge repository, a database. To query Freebase you use the Metaweb Query Language (MQL), which is based on JSON. The language is meant to be very simple and it is actually very interesting as well. The idea is that you fill out a tree which represents a partial graph with pieces that you know and then the system basically fills in all the slots that you left blank and delivers back all possible subgraphs.

For example, say you are watching a movie and you can't tell what it is. You know that the movie stars Patrick Swayze and an actress who was also in "Tank Girl." So you create a movie query and express all these facts, using JSON-style syntax. And when you run the query you get back that the actress is Lory Petty and the movie is "Point Break" and you also get links to IMDB. So the query and the results have the same structure and to find matches you simply traverse the set of results that is returned.

Building on this example, Freebase is really meant for complex inferencing queries, the sorts of questions that Google has no way of answering using its statistical frequency algorithms. For example, what US senators took money from a foreign entity? Turns out that both Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton received donations from UBS AG, based in Switzerland. That is a complex inferencing query that needs to be expressed in a query language before it can be answered and so questions of this nature are outside of the reach of any search engine -- and Wikipedia too, for that matter.

Resources

There is quite a lot of activity going on around Freebase today. Many enthusiasts are building small proof of concept applications showcasing what can be done in the future with this powerful database. You can stay on top of the cutting edge stuff coming both from the Freebase team and community at: http://download.freebase.com and http://research.freebase.com

The problem with the first road is that it relies upon a revenue model that is native to social media. What revenue model works for social media? The assumption is advertising, but CPM comes from traditional mass media and CPC is ideally suited to search. Where is the ad model that is native to social media? At the moment we are force-fitting CPM and CPC into social media for want of anything better.

Some might argue that there is no ad model for social media. We don't have an ad model for telephones, afterall, and that's a two-way communication medium like social media. Ominously, we didn't have an effective ad model for email, which is the earliest form of social media, until Google treated email as just more search fodder for CPC.

If social media is not funded by advertising, it must be funded by subscriptions or transactions. Neither is easy.

Social media is fundamentally different - it is few to few, not one to one like telephone or one to many like traditional media. There is also a fundamental problem for advertisers. We are focused on communicating with each other, not looking at content with some hopefully relatively relevant ads attached. Any advertising in that context is an annoying interruption, unless we learn to tune out the ads so effectively that it becomes useless to advertisers.

The lack of a native ad model is holding back any serious monetization of social networking. All we are seeing today is weak CPM and CPC rates. The overall numbers look OK because the audience is so large and the cost of audience acquisition is so low. But at some stage, social media has to move from the cool technology/promising opportunity phase to a fundamental new business type.

Lets look at a few attempts at a native revenue model for social media:

• The one idea that clearly failed was getting people to sell to their friends in a glorified Amway scheme - that was called Beacon (some RWW coverage here and here).
• In tightly controlled professional networking sites such as Sermo (for doctors only), the business model can best be described as "authorized lurking" - pharma companies are authorized to listen in to hear how they might improve their products. That seems a tad murky and I cannot see consumer companies paying to listen to dorm room chat, anyway.
• Group buying has some possibilities. It at least fits the peer ethos, and it could be popular in a recession. To date, though, this is only a theory as far as I know. If I had to pick one sustainable revenue model, this would be the one. But the spark of innovation that turns this from a promising idea to a $100m plus revenue line is still missing.

What new models have I missed? This Google search for "revenue model for social media" has a number of people asking the question, which is a good start, but if the equivalent of CPC for search is lurking out there, it is very well hidden.

Here is my take on which road the big social networking sites could take:

1. MySpace could potentially get away with the walled garden approach for a pretty large mainstream market, using music as the fundamental draw and later leading into other arts and entertainment. This makes MySpace less age-dependent than Facebook. Everybody loves music, art and entertainment, from pre-schoolers on up to grandparents. News Corp. is a media company through and through, so this route is in their DNA.
2. Facebook will have to become a utility for the world or a niche walled garden for college kids. Their DNA is too young to predict which way they will go. Both are viable, but neither will justify a $15 billion valuation, so they won't make this decision until new management steps in following a crisis. They cannot become a walled garden for the world, because their core community - college kids - will move into the world of work where they have to communicate in the wider world of the Internet. Once they have left college, their only connection to each other is as alumni and that ends up being a relatively weak connection as we grow older (despite what every generation believes when they are at college).
3. LinkedIn has a shot at becoming a mainstream, but work-centric, walled garden since the working world is constrained enough and follows well-defined conventions. LinkedIn is the network I use regularly and I have written about it before many times. They have now reached the stage where if they offered webmail that was as good as Gmail (and obviously as open as any standard webmail), it could become the default hangout for biz types. "Suits" could gradually stop talking about "living in Outlook" and talk about "living in LinkedIn." Add in some simple RSS-based startpage-like functionality and LinkedIn would be the place to start and end the workday. Biz people will pay a reasonable subscription fee - say less than $100 a year - for a package like that without any advertising. That is a bit of a stretch from where LinkedIn is today, but fundamentally viable in my opinion.

Clearly, any venture that succeeds in building a mainstream walled garden will become hugely valuable. They will effectively become the Internet for millions, which might even justify a $15 billion type valuation. The problem is that it is a very, very hard road to navigate successfully.

The mass-market utility model could also be hugely valuable at scale. My simplest description of this would be "social graph + communication tools." The communication tools could be email, SMS, VOIP, poking, walls, vampires, whatever turns people on. The social graph is the spam controller and way to make connections. The obvious players here are the vendors with big email networks - Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (GYM). This is the background story to all the M&A "sturm und drang."

The one company that most needs to make this strategic decision - Facebook - is the one that is most constrained by that paper valuation of $15 billion. Neither route - niche walled garden for college kids or mass-market utility going up against GYM - will justify $15 billion. So they have to pretend that mass-market walled garden is viable, even though nobody believes that anymore. That is one nasty dilemma. Do you think Microsoft knew that they were giving Facebook that nasty dilemma when they agreed to a $15 billion valuation? Gates and Ballmer are smart enough, in my humble opinion.

The mass-market utility model will win out in the end for 3 reasons:

1. The social graph is so closely linked to communications, which has always been a utility model.
2. The ownership issues around the social graph are murky. A utility skates past that problem, saying "you own, we manage." AT&T does not own your Rolodex, or insert ads when you are calling Mom because they own your connection to Mom.
3. The social graph has to be monetized in creative ways and the best way to make that happen is make it available to all the entrepreneurs and established businesses, on clear and simple terms.

The mass-market utility model will work through an API. That sounds similar to what is already out there, but with one big difference. The current APIs are all about getting your apps INTO a walled garden, or two or three walled gardens. The utility API will be about accessing the social graph, getting the social graph OUT of the utility and into your application, for some pre-defined cost. What you do after that is entirely up to you.

Image via Leo Reynolds.