Dr. TweetDreams pulls together elements new and old, including symbolic meanings from a 100-year-old dream dictionary and any and all tweets containing the phrase "had a dream." "I finally got to use all my cool natural language code," Zarrella told us last night. "I'm using a part-of-speech tagger, a wordstemmer, and Princeton's WordNet to generate a list of related word stems which are then matched against a dream dictionary."

Some of the analyses we tried out were pretty clear-cut:

Other tweets produced hilarious, convoluted or just plain strange results. One of the particularly interesting things about taking definitions from a 100-year-old dream dictionary is the charmingly antiquated social mores; woe to the married woman who dreams of hugging a man other than her husband! And check out the wonderful fortune in store for this lucky young lady:

Ah, how we long for the golden days of yesteryear, when marriage was a woman's best occupation! There were also a few misfires in terms of vocabulary; for example, a hundred years ago, a plane was a carpenter's tool, not a mode of transportation. Nevertheless, we found these idiosyncrasies charming.

Users can take a look at one of the most recent dream-related tweets or check out various analyses on Twitter.

If you're not clear on what exactly that means, don't feel bad... but don't write them off either. Instead, think of Dorthy.com as a new take on the old 43Things, the site which encourages users to list goals, share progress, and cheer each other on. Dorthy does the same but gets you there by making interesting use of Web 3.0 technologies like AI and natural language search.

According to Jim Anderson, the About.com co-founder who was hired as Dorthy's CTO earlier this year, the site's search engine doesn't use keyword-based search but rather has the user enter a fully formed question, statement, or phrase like "run a marathon in 4 hours." Not only does the search engine parse the semantics of your input using its proprietary algorithms, it also learns from you, incrementally enhancing your results upon every visit.

As an example, Anderson describes how a fictional user named Jennifer might search for information about a trip to Paris. Because Jennifer had previously shared other background information like the fact that she's an avid marathon runner, fluent in French, wants to learn to cook French food, and hates cruises, Dorthy.com will retrieve specific information related to those interests. The results would be filtered to highlight info on cooking schools, shopping, and popular running routes in Paris - things that would be interesting to Jennifer specifically.

This example doesn't even necessarily count as a "dream," it seems - you could plan an actual trip to Paris using Dorthy's technology, too. However, the overall point of the service is to provide you with information about a particular goal or aspiration and then connect you with others who feel the same.

Using Dorthy

When performing searches on Dorthy, you'll have the option to create your own page on a specific topic or view the topic pages others have already created. These pages feature popular articles, videos, photos, and blog entries from the web and are constantly being updated with new content. When you find content you like, even if it's on someone else's page, you can easily copy it over to a page of your own.

After this initial "discovery" process is complete, you can use Dorthy's "Connect" feature to meet others also interested in your topic so you can share your progress and encourage each other, much like how the above-mentioned 43Things operates.

In the future, Dorthy hopes to expand their offering to go beyond simply being a consumer-targeted Web-based service to one that could benefit the enterprise (think "I want to go to a virtualization conference in Las Vegas"), or so reported eWeek earlier this year. They also plan on moving to mobile at some point, too.

At the moment, Dorthy.com is in private alpha, but you can sign up to join here.

How It Works

DreamAds appear only during your REM sleep, as a footer overlay to your dream. According to scientists, things that we see during our sleep are up to 10 times more influential than the things that we see in our real life. And this is exactly what makes DreamAds a potential cash-cow for Google.

DreamAds works with a very light apparel that you put on your head. It is said to be so light that you won't even feel it and so it won't disturb your sleep in any way. The apparel will be distributed for free, starting with a beta rollout in San Francisco - dates as yet unknown. Here is a concept drawing of the device, which we got from our Google source:

Full image

On the business model, we were told us that the ultimate goal is a CPA model (Cost Per Action), whereby ads are embedded into dreams so that users can 'action' them. However the current technology isn't that sophisticated. So in the first version of DreamAds, Google will start with a 'Cost Per Impression' based ad model.

Conclusion

This is an intriguing product that has the potential to take Adsense to the next level. Google will probably be able to make around $500 per DreamAds apparel user. And with the upcoming CPA version, the high relevancy could increase Google's revenues to $5,000 per person. Think about that: $5,000 * 1 billion users means an unparalleled distribution model for advertisers and a gigantic revenue source for Google.

Our source didn't confirm this, but we've heard a rumor that Google has already started a private beta program with a limited number of trusted testers in the Mountain View area. ReadWriteWeb will stay on top of this story and bring you updates as they happen. In the meantime, please share your thoughts in the comments.