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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:

1. Spock promised powerful people search, and so far has delivered a (drum roll)… social network scraper. See “idiocy writ large” for reference.
2. 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.
3. 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

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Another Tag Silo - Twitter Hashtags

A few days ago, I riffed on how the failure of user-powered tagging was what was driving the need for a semantic web - that jumbled, discontiguous tagging implementations had created a plethora of tag city-states who’s inability to talk on a “national” level had reduced the tagging movement to a curiosity.

Today, another entrant in the form of Hashtags - tags for twitter post. Again, useful within the silo of the twitter-verse, but clunky to extend outwards. You can read more on hashtags via stoweboyd, or stephanie booth, or check out full coverage.

The stated purpose of hashtags is to all one to follow a topical twitter-stream, as was useful for those techies fleeing the SoCal fires this past year. But how much cooler would it be if you could stitch together Twitter content, Flickr coverage, posted videos, blog posts, and news, into a single realtime view of a given situation? That would look a lot like the output of a semantic application.

To do so now would require onerous hard-coding of proprietary hooks into each services API (twitter, flicker, youtube, etc.), with more custom coding to parse out time and geo-relevance data. As I mentioned in my previous article, a two-tiered tagging system composed of machine and human tags, shared in a consistent format, and conforming to common baseline standards would enable this.

hashtags, semantic, tagging, tags twitter

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BBC on RFID / WiFi Gateway - Exactly what I’m talking about - the Semantic World

The BBC has an article today on the utility of combining RFID tags with WiFi for location tracking of people & resources.

Add to that presence-profiles (i.e.: changing your contact preferences based on whether you’re in a meeting room, your office, or the parking garage), and you’ve got the “Semantic World” where people, places, objects, and actions have meaning, properties, and methods - all of which can interact with each other.

I wrote on this a few weeks ago:

There’s a number of trends in technology that have the potential to come together and enable some truly radical changes in our day to day lives. I’d throw out RFID, location-aware devices, and pervasive wifi as primary examples. What I’ve really been hunting for, however, its a way to bring it all together - essentially a small, location-aware RFID-to-WiFi gateway.

Read the rest of that post here.

Sadly the BBC missed my blog post… and the larger implications of this combination of technologies.

bluetooth, gateway, gps, location, presence, rfid, scifi, semantic, semanticweb, semanticworld, web wifi

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The Semantic World - properties and methods for the r.w.

There’s a number of trends in technology that have the potential to come together and enable some truly radical changes in our day to day lives. I’d throw out RFID, location-aware devices, and pervasive wifi as primary examples. What I’ve really been hunting for, however, its a way to bring it all together - essentially a small, location-aware RFID-to-WiFi gateway.

Consider the following scenario:

You walk into a meeting room. Your IM presence flips to “busy,” your cellphone switches to silent and direct-to-voicemail, and friends/family/co-workers with access to your schedule can see that you made it to the meeting and how long you’ll be there. When you leave the meeting room, everything flips back, except IM status which flips to “on the road.” You get into a cab, get back to your office, and get out of the cab - payment is automatic. You finally make it back to your desk, at which point IM status changes to available, your phone calls route to your desk phone, and your PC logs itself back in.

Essentially, your identity is projected in a cloud around you (”extended identity”), and it can affect “things” around you, and be affected in turn - i.e.: the act of entering or leaving an area affects you; the act of leaving a cab with which you have a payment agreement affects the cab (it gets paid).

How this is enabled is by applying a software methodology to the larger world - creating a semantic world where a meeting room knows that its a meeting room, a taxicab knows that its a cab and can ask for payment, and your extended identity knows how (generally) to handle interactions that it encounters on your behalf. Each of these “realworld objects” has properties and methods associated with it to enable transactions. There two bits to this:

1. Semantic Infrastructure: For the meeting room above, I’d see the doorway as the semantic infrastructure bit - the frame would have either embedded RFID or Bluetooth infrastrucutre to communicate with the extended identities that pass through it.
2. Extended Identity Profile: A means of projecting and managing your extended identity; your profile would reside online, projected and accessed locally via a smartcard, or cellphone (Bluetooth again).

Anyway - bits and peices of this exist already - cars that don’t need keys, office-access smartcards, etc. But they’re far from pervasive, and built on a frustratingly fragmented infrastructure that doesn’t connect anything to anything else. Getting the technology more widely deployed will require a cheap, open, easily programmable, extensible, and connected device - something akin to the Sun SPOT. Stitching it all together into a useable, single-point-of-access “real world user profile” will require some serious software infrastructure; the company that positions itself to provide that will be 10 steps ahead of the curve.

</end nerdgasm>

bluetooth, gps, rfid, semantic, semantic web sun

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