TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

Predictions for 2008, #3: Semantic apps will continue to suck

Well, “suck” is probably too strong a work. How about “Semantic apps will continue to be completely irrelevant?”

2007 was a year heavy on buzz around so-called next generation, 3.0, semantic apps - things like PowerSet & Hakia (natural language search), Spock (people search), Twine (who knows), and so on.

Well, after a year of anticipation, each is either unlaunched (powerset), unloved (spock is weak), or unheard of (twine).

Consider the value propositions:

Spock promised powerful people search, and so far has delivered a (drum roll)… social network scraper. See “idiocy writ large” for reference.
Next gen search engines promised better results than google and so far have delivered… junk. See my off the cuff Hakia vs. Google comparo for reference.
Apps like Twine promise to automate the discovery of relationships between your disparate bits of information - but if you listen to the video there’s a lot of buzzwords (semantic graph! open! graph! wikis! ontologies!) and little substance (its got smarts!) beyond keyword parsing.

…so my prediction is that Google will continue to kick ass, the so-called next-gen startups will continue to languish or sit or beta-purgatory, and slowly the concept of “semantic” will fade from the public eye as VC’s find something else to latch onto.

(Quick update: Twine has also committed what I consider to be the cardinal sin of marketing plans - attempting to create their own vernacular, i.e.: in scoble’s video above one “twines” a link, and creates a “twine” about something - arggh. Its as bad as the now defunct Teqlo)

2008, google, hakia, powerset, predictions, semantic, spock, twine web3.0

CastTV - is there room between verticals and gootube?

I got into a little back and forth on Mike’s post on TechCrunch about CastTV (see the original TechCrunch CastTV post too). CastTV is a video search engine - indexing video from top video sites (YouTube, etc, etc), as well as across the Internet.

CastTV brings some unique twists to the table with their indexing system - it accumulates index data about a video across the internet, for instance - i.e.: if the video is posted in 15 different places, CastTV will treat the video as a single, indexed entity, with fifteen logical locations, as opposed to 15 different entities with different keywords, etc. According to TechCrunch, CastTV also allows for comparison shopping between download sites.

Anyway - my basic conjecture is that CastTV is another Riya - a cool technology in search of a business in a hype-heavy segment. Riya went from a buzz superstar facial recognition technology powerhouse to a marginal “visual search” tool (at Like.com) that let’s you search the internet for handbags you might like or rugs with nice patterns.

My conjecture is based on the fact that between YouTube/GVid and iTunes, most video on the web is well indexed, and keyword, tag, and genre searches, as well as social recommendations, meet most everyone’s search needs. Perhaps if the user-submitted video market becomes more fragmented over time (with an ascendant MySpace video or Photobucket), there may be a case for CastTV. Similarly, if CastTV wanted to delve into the grey market waters of torrents and P2P, it might have more appeal. But as a largely meta-search engine for the top video sites, I question why I would go to CastTV instead of the site where I know CastTV is going to return its listings from anyway.

My other thought is that the specialized searches for which CastTV will have the most appeal will be better executed by vertical sites such as SuTree.com that specialize in a particular video niche.

So - for mainstream searches, I’m seeing CastTV as redundant, and for specialized searches, I see it outgunned by dedicated vertical sites. That being said, I’m very willing to be proven wrong, and happily requested a preview invitation. The other suggestion I made in the TechCrunch comment thread was that CastTV deploy its unique indexing technology elsewhere - using the cross-internet-meta-index for keywords and phrases would at the very least provide a hype alternative to Powerset for the google-pundits.

Note: Here’s what I mean about being proven wrong. Maybe Like.com and the Riya team are finding their footing?