Group items tagged

Interesting. Looks like Nova's moved on from T2.

I think Nova has contributed greatly, and will continue to do so. His gifting is not in finishing, but in starting - starters and finishers are seldom the same person. What is unusual here is that a starter is given large amounts of capital but the vc's don't know enough to pair him with a finisher. One of my business partners said a business needs a dreamer, a doer and a sob. To which I asked, so that makes you.....? T2 is based on what I know of it (unless they've come up with some scaling algorithm, which isn't a product, and should be sold based on the patent to MS or google) fails on differentiation, and is entering a market against formidable incumbents. Hence Nova's thoughts that the next 'google' needs to differentiate itself further are actually quite valid. If I were Nova's vc on T2 I would pull the plug. Never talk about your next project.

Not so long ago, in fact just a couple years ago, Twine (T1) was far ahead of the competition in the area of interest networking (building of communities around interests). I think Nova and T1 really did a good job in *pioneering* the idea that social networking should not just focus on people connecting to each other but rather on the topics that people share an interest for. For some reasons, Twine did not try to stay ahead in this field and didn't integrate improvements that seemed quite obvious. I would have liked to see T1 evolve towards real semantic tagging, connecting Twine tags and topics to linked data entities. I would have liked to see a T1 with stronger collaborative filtering: even the "like" button that was - i believe - introduced by FriendFeed, is now everywhere, except on Twine... I don't think that what Nova is discussing here has much to do with T2, just like I don't think that the semtweet project that he tweeted about a couple weeks ago has much to do with T2 either. I agree that so far Nova has been a dreamer, an inventor, more than a "doer", but I still like to check what he is dreaming about. Sometimes his dreams seem very deep and interesting: I don't find the current T2 dream (faceted search based on Apache-Solr technology) very exciting, unless something big comes out of it with respect to RDF. I am not that excited either about Semtweet, unless again it brings along something big with respect to RDF. And now Nova is sharing some new thoughts about some new user-machine interaction that wouldn't be based on search but on something else... I agree it's still pretty vague and not very convincing yet...

FishMan - this sounds a little bit like Ning, a socnet for all folks (build your own!) Why do you think there is no monetization by any one of these efforts? That's a key part to what I'm imagining for HBSN. Hmmmmm

Checking into ad.ly, their pay rate and advertisers aren't based on your attention, they are based strictly on the number of followers you have. Their whole model is wrapped around slight-of-hand diversion. They figure that by dropping an ad tweet into your own personal twitterstream on an every other day basis, will appear innocent enough on the surface, that some (>1%?) will mistake it for something you personally tweeted and since they follow you blindly like hooded lemurs in Jonestown, they;ll drink your koolaid and make a buying decision. Seems a bit underhanded to me. And they aren't paying me because I might be a good target, they are paying me because I have a high enough unwashed masses quotient to justify the exposure. I set my rate for $5000 figuring that even though I have fewer than 100 followers, they are quality followers and not bots (except for Kurt) and that my endorsement to them is worth a great deal. So far, the till's empty.

if you advertise to me I will recycle it on an hourly loop and feed it back to you

Ouch, David Brin ...

his book is on my shelf, my wife started reading it but stopped as she found it too depressing - it will likely be right up my alley - if we accepted the premise that we would be in a surveilled state then it would be enormously helpful that it was a commons- I do not accept that we should allow this surveilled state to happen, nor that we should accept it as good, even if it is a commons. I also don't believe that it will be a commons. It should not exist, and should be fought every step of the way by people whose minds have not opened so far that their brains have fallen out. It is completely possible with technology to give individuals the power to set levels of privacy to particular counter parties. It is politically possible to regulate the use of surveillance. One can make the argument that people can simply surveil with their camera phones, but you do not see that happening as it would be culturally unacceptable (rude if you will). I find the acceptance of big brother as inevitable troubling.

David Brin used well thought out logic to make his argument. Zuckerburg is an idiot. He's the face of 1984's Big Brother, except at puberty.

buy buy birdie

Good to know, Jack. Please share if you find good examples of such searches with "great results over Google". Today I seem to have problems signing in (with Chrome - but it works with Firefox), so I suppose they are making some changes. I'm having some problems with the collections: can't find how to create a new collection or edit an existing one. Have you been using collections yet? Do they work for you?

Do you have the iPhone app. for Evri - EvriVerse? Very interesting. It uses the mapping that I wrote about in my letter to all of this group today in response to the Twain letter.

anyone ever heard of this place?

nope. anything interesting? (beyond the unique view that content creators should be paid)

My first quick glance appeared to show a bunch of hopeful storefronts with nobody shopping. Not very apparent how money is made either. I think it's ad click throughs, but I didn't stick around very long. I fear it's another of those 'lacking momentum' issues.

a warning, that said single use software is really boring, so count me out if that's the idea, hence why I keep saying we're not going to make any money on this, so let's move on and get with creating the damn thing

we have at least 10-ish people who deeply care, that translates to a statistical user base of considerably more, likely enough to fund this

OK...now we are looking in the right mirror. I still feel that there can be a parallel path of developing an organization (spectrum from company through content producers union) AND start some prototyping work and see where it leads us.