(HBSN) How to Build a Social Network

The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability.

In other areas, the improvements are questionable at best. Graphical user interfaces are typically full of symbols. Most graphical elements you see on your screen are meant to stand for ideas or concepts

Details and realism can distract from these concepts.

At last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. Today, the startup is launching a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail.

It’s easy to read too much into these idle Tweets.  Spivack is the CEO of a search startup. It stands to reason that he would have meetings with Google and and other big search engines about lots of things, ranging from licensing his semantic search technology to an outright sale.  The one thing it is pretty safe to conclude is that both Google and Bing are very interested in semantic search.  Bing seems to be further along than Google, as the launch of recipe search indicates.

hthth    "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -H. P. Lovecraft 4 minutes ago from web

novaspivack @melissapierce danka! less than 10 seconds ago from TweetDeck in reply to melissapierce As for T2 -- we've made more progress... new stuff in lab to automate even more of the process for webmasters... not in my screenshots yet less than a minute ago from TweetDeck After 9 years of working on semantic web, it's good to see it finally being understood by business people. Not just us geeks. 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck Today I have been inundated with new interest in T2. Seems that vertical semantic search is hot all of a sudden. Finally. 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck The Twine T2 project is by far the most advanced vertical semantic search ecosystem platform. Check out: http://bit.ly/75amWI 5 minutes ago from TweetDeck The new battlefield of search is going to be around vertical semantic search. This is the year. It's coming. 6 minutes ago from TweetDeck

Ning, the company that lets you build your own social network, crossed the two-million network mark this month. Co-founded by Marc Andreessen, Ning helps people create niche social networks around special interests from social justice to late-night comedy shows. The Palo Alto-based company now has 41 million members across its networks, adding 1 million new communities since April of last year.

When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that 'the age of privacy is over' (read: ReadWriteWeb), I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am. The logic goes something like this: People I knew didn't used to like to be public. Now "everyone" is being public. Ergo, privacy is dead. This isn't new. This is the exact same logic that made me want to scream a decade ago when folks used David Brin to justify a transparent society. Privacy is dead, get over it. Right? Wrong!

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We give a lot of talks and presentations about the ways and places companies and their employees learn the fastest. We call these learning environments creation spaces — places where individuals and teams interact and collaborate within a broader learning ecology so that performance accelerates. During these discussions, it's inevitable that somebody raises their hand. "Wait a minute," they say, "isn't this just knowledge management all over again?" It's an understandable concern. Knowledge management, after all, was probably the hottest topic in management in the 1990s. "If only our company knew what our company knows" was the mantra in those days. With knowledge becoming the most important factor of production, surely competitive success awaited those companies that could effectively manage what their employees knew.