I own an eReader now, and it is a ... Nook

Today is my birthday and I got a Nook Simple Touch Reader as the birthday gift. I was asked which model of the eReader I prefer to. After struggling between Nook and the Amazon Kindle, at the end my vote was for the Nook Simple Touch.

The e-Ink technology is fascinating to the really enthusiastic book readers such as myself. Nook Color, despite of its richer services and colorful display, is not a suitable product for the serious book readers. Nook Color is fun and it may be a great gift for kids especially when we want to encourage them to read more. But the device is too heavy to read books heavily. The Nook Simple Touch is very light in weight and it is very comfortable to be hold in hand for long-time (such as consecutively several hours) reading. Furthermore, one must feel painful to read books using Nook Color under the bright lights such as sunshine.

Comparing to choosing between color and the e-Ink black/white, the vote between Nook and Kindle is more tricky. Both of the gadgets are great for reading the electronic books. I was much tempted to buy a Kindle. The books on Amazon are generally cheaper. Moreover, often we can find more user reviews about the books in Amazon. Besides, until now Amazon provides us more choices of the free books that are classic in literature. I must say that currently the free books provided by Barnes & Noble in Nook is significantly less than those provided by Amazon in Kindle on both of the numbers and the quality of the books.

But, I still chose a Nook!

The killer is the store. I do not mean, however, the Barnes & Noble store. What I mean is the store, a physical book store!

A book store is more than where sells books. Otherwise we may certainly replace it with the virtual stores such as Amazon. But a book store is more than selling books.

A book store is a local knowledge hub. A book store is where people are immersed into knowledge, physically! In a book store parents may pass their love of knowledge to the young generation and the children can feel it through the physical experiences. Our world is physical instead of virtual because the physical objects deliver us their embodied message that is beyond what virtual may speak.

I feel grateful that Barnes & Noble seems understand this key difference. Bound with Nook Barnes & Noble designs several in-store features that encourage people going back to their local stores. For example, Barnes & Noble allows every Nook user having one hour per day free reading of the entire Barnes & Noble eBook collections in any of their local stores. Such a feature very well balances the copy right protection and the advertisement of the genuine knowledge products. It is hard for Amazon to provide a similar service in Kindle to compete because Amazon does not have any local store. As the result, it will be equivalent of giving up the copy right protection if Kindle tries to provide a same 1-hour per day free reading service global wide.

Moreover, based on their local stores Barnes & Noble can provide many location-based special Apps in their Nook eReaders that Amazon cannot even dare to match. The recent news that Nook Color first to offer Angry Birds with location-based extras is another great example how Barnes & Noble may eventually defeat Amazon in the field of the electronic book selling.

To the end, virtual is not going to replace the real world unconditionally. The future of our society will be a balance between the digitized and globalized virtual world and the physical and local reality world. Nook is such a product that is originated based on this balance. Therefore, I decided to choose Nook. And I recommend it to all the Thinking Space readers.

Twitter and the collective storytelling

Along with Google and Facebook, Twitter has been an icon of the new Web. To learn from its success, in this post I take a look at the relationship between Twitter and the collective storytelling.

As we know, an essential character of Web 2.0 is the embodiment of collectivism on the Web. Besides the often-mentioned collective intelligence, however, there are many other types of the embodiment of collectivism. One of them is collective storytelling---a particular joint between collective intelligence and collective behavior. As its name tells, storytelling is the combination of "story" and "telling". Apply it to the associative law, the collective storytelling is therefore the combination of the collective story and the collective telling. The collective story is a particular form of the collective intelligence. The collective telling is a special embodiment of the collective behavior.

According to Frank Rose, we tell stories so that we may make sense of our world and share the understanding with others. Therefore, the collective storytelling is a collective way of making sense of the world we live and sharing the understanding with each other. By this mean, we see the compelling value of the collective storytelling. Through it, we actually are able to get touch to each individual's reasoning about the portion of the world and the society he lives. Such a reasoning is the essence of many modern time business models such as advertisement, retail, and the news business. Twitter's success of implementing the collective storytelling, therefore, forms the foundation of its business success.

There are a few bright spots of how Twitter has implemented the collective storytelling. The understanding of these spots may help many of us know how to create our own solutions in the new Web.

The first bright spot is the 140-character length limit. This brilliant innovation must be laid upon a very deep understanding about the nature of the collective storytelling. To be effectively empowered by the collectiveness, we need to break a barrier that the collective outcome is biased by few over-weighted messages. The enforcement of the 140-character length limit breaks the messages into small pieces so that the system may compose stories collectively with rich content and concise structure. It, therefore, enables us to see the objective realities of the collective stories created without be trapped too much into individual biases.

The second bright spot is the embedded tags. In each tweet one can embed one or more arbitrary tags by adding the symbol "#" in front of the tag word. This little invention is a great leap forward in the history of storytelling. This simple but effective method enables the storytellers (i.e. the Twitter users such as you and me) to subjectively direct his or her own small pieces into multiple grand story plots. This method is a great example of how a small piece of information can be creatively and at the same time automatically reused in the Web. By this mechanism, the collective storytelling is no longer a traditional many-to-one process but a novel many-to-many process. Therefore, creatively Twitter has improved the production rate of the collective story creation. As we all know, the improvement of the production rate of the key product is a cornerstone to any business success.

The last but not the least, the third bright spot I share about Twitter is the embedded links among the storytellers. A hardness to tell a story collectively is the sequence arrangement of the many storytellers. When a story is contributed by many people, it is really difficult to sort the people in an order that is best for the storytelling. Twitter has not totally solved the problem either. But, at least, it has invented a way so that there is an order of the storytellers that is reasonably well for the thoughtful storytelling. The method is again fairly simple. Any Tweet writers can embed the next or previous storytellers in their own small pieces of story by adding the symbol "@" in front of the name of the designated storytellers. Through this simple mechanism, the small pieces can be linked by the storytellers based on the volunteered election of their peer tellers. This type of election must not be the perfect solution for the order of the storytelling. But it is a reasonably well and so far the best solution we can achieve.

I believe, however, that if Twitter can invest more of its human resources in studying the concept of storytelling and applying it to its product, the service will become a more and more crucial piece of the new Web. Storytelling is a primary character of human beings. And this is why a service designated itself to this character may also become a central piece of human life.

From Best Buy to Five Star Appliance, a culture conflict

February 22, 2011, Best Buy China (百思买) announced that it shut down its own retail stores in China but "to consolidate its China business operations under its wholly-owned Five Star brand." This announcement is not a big hit in today's news. I am, however, interested in it since it reveals something that is critical for not only Best Buy, but any successful western companies that want to expand their business in China.

One needs to apply different models to run the same business in China and in United States. Although this idea is not new at all, many people still do not truly get it until they fail. The business is the same; but the culture where the business runs is very different.

Let's take a look at Best Buy China. First of all, "百思买" (the Chinese translation of the Best Buy brand) is a dumb brand name to native Chinese. When the first time I saw the name, I was wondering who the hell suggested such a dumb name. Straightforward translation, "百思买" in plain Chinese means to buy it after a hundred times of rethinking. The meaning in Chinese translation is exactly the opposite to the Best Buy in native English, which means "no-brainer, this is simply the best buy". If I were the translator, I would recommend "最佳电", which is much better than the current translation and with exactly the same intention the Best Buy brand in English wants to broadcast. Some people may say that it is just a name. But it shows how little the Best Buy executives had known Chinese and the Chinese culture. A bad brand name often leads to a business failure; and it is proved again.

For any business, the first thing of success is to correctly identify the group of its customers. Best Buy certainly has no problem on the answer in United States, and in many other countries too. But it does not recognize the answer correctly in China. In United States, the Best Buy customers are typically the middle class. And it is the same in many other nations too. In China, however, there is no real middle class despite many politicians or economists claim its existence. In China, there are only two classes among people in history and till now---the elite class and the rest. A business can either serve the elite class or serve the rest. Trying to serve in the middle is simply an illusion to a grand-size business!

The Chinese society is divided by a magic word---官(Chinese pronunciation "Guan", which means Official). One is either a 官 or he is not. If he is, he belongs to the elite class basically. Otherwise, he belongs to the rest. Any ranks, including the pure academic titles in the western society such as professor or the technological titles such as engineer, is evaluated in China with certain equivalent to a level of 官. For example, a mayor-level professor versus a governor-level professor. To the people living in the western countries, it must be really hard to think of a distinction between a mayor-level professor and a governor-level professor. What does it mean? Isn't he just a professor? No, he isn't. In China one's social rank is generally determined by the equivalence of their professional title to the level of 官. So a governor-level professor is certainly superior to a mayor-level professor, discarding their real academic achievement, indeed, most of the time.

Any business, especially the retail business, that does not understand the former distinction may unlikely sustain in China. This is the essence behind Best Buy China's failure.

Best Buy wants to sell its product to the middle-class Chinese. But who are they? The elite class people generally expect more superior service than Best Buy normally provides in the western nations, which addresses the ordinary western middle-class people. To the rest of Chinese, however, the Best Buy service is an overhead since it increases the "unnecessary" cost that they do not want to pay at all. Between the two classes there is a niche, which might be named "middle class". But their number is limited even in the big cities such as Shanghai. A small start-up business may fit into the niche. It is, however, definitely too narrow to sustain a super-size business like Best Buy.

From now on Best Buy hands its business execution to the wholly-owned local business Five Star Appliance. May it solve the problem? I am cautiously optimistic to it. Fully localize a global business into China is a right step. But the step by itself is not enough to secure success. Until the Best Buy administration in United States truly understands the Chinese society, Best Buy will not succeed in China.

Again, the message is not just for Best Buy.

My brief comment on iPad, Siri, GBuzz, and Aardvark Acquisition

Due to my schedule, I do not have time to make intensive posts that explore the news in depth as I used to do. To celebrate the Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day (this year they happen to be in the same day, Feb. 14) together with the Thinking Space readers, however, I would like to share my brief comment on some of them with my friends. Happy holidays!

iPad

iPad represents a remarkable breakthrough in concept. Its current product design is, however, immature. It is a terrible misleading to think of iPad an enlarged iPhone. To see the real intrinsic distinction, let's take a minute thinking of the following comparison.

The innovation of notebook computer brings the Web to people anywhere in the world; the innovation of iPhone brings people anywhere in the world to the Web; the innovation of iPad, on the other hand, makes an instant bridge between a person anywhere in the world and a specialized subset of the Web---his Web of interest. This is the real gap Steve Jobs claimed to fill in the product launching show.

Certainly, the current iPad design has not reached the goal yet. This is why I call it immature.

Siri

Siri on iPhone is a milestone though there is still a long long way ahead to reach a meaningful success.

Believe it or not, Siri and iPad actually belong to the same philosophy---developing a personal assistant. iPad plans to construct a hardware platform of personal assistants. Siri attempts to build a software platform of personal assistants. Compared to iPad, the road ahead for Siri is even tougher.

On the positive side, Siri provides a fascinating environment to experiment many key concepts of the Semantic Web and linked data in the real world. Idehen Kingsley must be interested in exploring his journey with this service. We as normal users, however, still need more time to watch the future progress of this service.

Google Buzz

Twitter but in Google? Maybe. But GBuzz means more.

Google Buzz reveals the GMail users the social communities they implicitly belong. These social communities existed disregarding GBuzz. GBuzz, however, makes them explicit. This is a critical step Google made towards exploring the treasure of the social web. Google has been hesitated on how to step into the social web for long time. Finally it seems the company finds their unique asymmetric strength to enter this market by cashing the popularity of its dominating GMail service. This is remarkable because in comparison Microsoft still does not get how they might exploit their asymmetric strength in this field.

Google's Aardvark Acquisition

The innovation of Aardvark is ended. This acquisition is probably a good news to the Aardvark investors and the Mechanical Zoo employees. It is, on the other hand, not so good a news to the evolution of the Web.

In short, Google's ultimate interest contradicts to the eventual potential of Aardvark. Google's ultimate interest is to make itself a super-smart brain while everybody using it may follow it stupidly. The social search services such as Aardvark aims to locate smart people and make people rather than machines be smarter through the social communication. This contradiction in the level of philosophy actually is the intrinsic reason that made the Aardvark designers leave Google several years ago. Although at present the power of money brings them back, it does not solve the fundamental conflict.

I had a phone conversation with Max Ventilla two years ago and we shared quite a few thoughts about what the social search was and how to approach it. I am glad of and sincerely congratulate his achievement in business by sealing this acquisition deal. I am afraid, however, that he will start another journey sooner or later when his original passion catches him again.

My Impression of Twine 2.0

Radar Networks is about to release Twine 2.0. The CEO, Nova Spivack, had made a presentation of the coming T2. I include the video in the following. It takes less than 5 minutes and is worth of watching.



From the beginning, Twine is a service that I constantly study. I had written the first impression, the second impression, and Twine went public that shared my analysis of the service before its beta, in the beginning of its invitation-only beta, and when it went public, respectively. I would like to continue this tradition for the news of the T2 release.

In short, the T2 moves Twine closer to the realm of Web search in contrast to Web bookmarking, based on Nova's talk in the released video.

Although there is natural connection between bookmarking and search, the distinction between semantic bookmarking and semantic search is significant. Usually, through bookmarking we briefly store the Web pages in which we are interested. Then by search we may retrieve the particular Web page of interest out of the pool of bookmarked pages. But semantic bookmarking asks for the organization of the semantics only within a self-defined knowledge network, i.e., basically with respect to every individual user only. Semantic search, however, demands the organization of the semantics cross the varied knowledge networks, i.e., across the varied perspective of knowledge organization over multiple users. This distinction dramatically increases the degree of complexity of the problem. I am truly impressed by the new announcement. At the same time, however, I really feel doubt of how much Twine 2.0 could solve the problem.

I feel that Twine missed something critical in its progress. In the following I will try to explain my viewpoint of what it might have missed.

Within Twine, there are actually three layers of semantic representations, which I would call them the layer of the twines, the layer of the individual knowledge networks, and the layer of the overall knowledge network. As the names suggest, the layer of the overall knowledge network represents the entire knowledge stored in Twine.com, the layer of the individual knowledge networks is composed by individual users' personal knowledge networks, and the layer of the twines is composed by all the individual twines defined in Twine.com.

Until now, Twine 1.0 pays most of its attention to the layer of the twines. Based on Nova's video talk, Twine 2.0 will mostly dedicate to the layer of the overall knowledge network. The missing part is thus the layer of the individual knowledge networks.

Back to my first impression of Twine, I had highly praised Twine's effort on developing the personal knowledge networks. They should be the foundation of Twine in contrast to the twines. Although it sounds ironically, it is indeed reasonable because the twines are nothing but the links among the individual knowledge networks. It is indeed the individual knowledge networks, instead of the twines, that are truly what the users are interested.

Unfortunately, it seems that Twine jumps back and forth between the layer of the twines and the layer of the overall knowledge network. But it forgets the crucial one that is the real foundation on which a best-performing Twine must rely.

On the other hand, it is much more feasible for Twine to develop a good business model if it does semantic search rather than semantic bookmarking. I guess that this is the real motivation underneath.

I am still look forward to the service. However, I feel sorry that it chose to walk the most difficult way to go ahead rather than choosing the other less aggressive but more stable (and promising) ways of approaching.

Think beyond Build-A-BearVille (the Second Life for kids)

My daughter, Vania, loves to play Build-A-BearVille, the virtual world of Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc. After watching her playing several times, I find that the game is truly addictive to kids (especially to the girls) as many adults have been addicted to Second Life.

I suppose all of the Thinking Space readers must have had more or less experiences on the online social networking communities. By contrast, there are indeed a few very interesting innovation in Build-A-BearVille that are worth of sharing and thinking. Build-A-BearVille demonstrates something beyond its domain.

1) Virtualize the real world into the virtual world, and monetize the connection between the two worlds

The most impressive service provided by the Build-A-BearVille is to build a stuff animal in the real Build-A-Bear workshop and it immediately becomes a living pet of yours in the virtual Build-A-BearVille world. More than that, after declaring the birth of the pet Build-A-BearVille automatically provides you a well-designed virtual condo that both of you and the pet may live happily ever after together in the virtual world. This is the primary business model of Build-A-BearVille. (And you can imagine, we build a bear for Vania because of this game.) But it means more than the bears.

What Build-A-BearVille suggests is indeed that there exists a bridge between the virtual world and the real world. Unlike Second Life which sells virtual lands or the traditional online shopping sites which sells only the real products, Build-A-BearVille monetizes the connection between the virtual world and the real world. That is, once we have a thing in the real world; we may also want it in the virtual world (and be more fancy since in the virtual world it can be given life that is impossible in the real world). In similar, once we have experienced a virtual product in the virtual world, we may want it in the real form in our real life as well. This connection between the real world and the virtual world could become an even greater market than simply the virtual world stuffs or purely the real world products.

Imagine it. In the future, whenever one buys a real thing, the thing automatically becomes part of his belongs in his virtual community. Whenever one tries to buy a real thing, however, she may first experience it with very cheap (or free) price in her virtual life until being satisfied.

Many times, we do not really want to have a very different second life in the virtual world, which is too much unrealistic. By contrast, what we often expect is to have an adjustable clone of our current real life. By this way the virtual life becomes an experimental bed of the real life in which we may try varied options that are too expensive to test in the real life. More importantly, by which we may test the consequence of many of our decisions before we truly make them real in the real world (which will be unchangeable).

2) Make vocabulary be controlled

Unlike the adult social networking sites, Build-A-BearVille does not allow "free" speech. By contrast, all the allowable sentences and phrases are pre-built. The users can choose the phrases they want to say by selecting instead of typing.

The motivation of this design is obvious to the kid sites such as Build-A-BearVille. First, many of its users (the young kids) may not even be able to type, or at least to type correctly. Second, it ensures that the community is well guarded in good manner, only! Therefore, the parents become more willing to allow their kids playing the game.

My thought is, however, why not make the vocabulary in the adult social sites be controlled as well. And there are reasons.

First, controlled vocabulary brings more discipline. A social site (unless it is Facebook) needs to have a focus. To allow anything often leads to do nothing well, and then the users are getting bored. The controlled vocabulary will force the users to the theme of the site. Although it looks like that the users lose the freedom of speech, it increases the efficiency of getting the work done.

Do not try to hold the users indefinitely in your site by adding many meaningless fancy services. Remember that time to anybody is precious. So speed up the process. Let the users know what they can do/say and what they cannot do/say immediately without exploration. When a site does this, it keeps the right users to itself and establishes a strong and stable community.

Second, controlled vocabulary preserves virtue online. It helps building a great environment so that every user comes with happiness and leave with delightfulness. The users can be certain on what will NOT occur when coming to the site. This effect could be much greater than it seems.

Third but definitely not the least, controlled vocabulary enables strong support on user data mining and many other user data analysis services. With controlled vocabulary, it is much easier to build a network of the linked data. Therefore, the site is able to develop much better domain-specific services for the users that are very hard to be implemented without the restriction of controlled vocabulary.

Summary

Since our Web itself is in its childhood, we often learn more from the design of the sites for kids than from the sites for adults. The intelligence of the machines that the Web is upon is closer to the kids than to the adults. This is thus why I feel the beauty of Build-A-BearVille. Try it you may get more inspiration.

Imindi private beta, a door towards the next generation Web

Web 2.0 is passing and a new generation of the Web is emerging. While many of us are curious on the next generation, Imindi finally released its private beta eight months after the TC50 2008 in which it was one of the 50 finalists over more than 1000 applicants. The new beta shows us a few clues of the upcoming future.

Imindi is a service to enable regular Web users to construct their own embodied mind sets and also to connect the individually constructed mind sets together so that a normal Web user can directly explore the tremendous power of the collective human mind.

In person, I have closely involved with Adam Lindemann on the Imindi service design. To readers who are interested in Web technology and artificial intelligence, Imindi can be seen to be another take of what Wolfram Alfa does. While Wolfram Alfa aims to construct a centrally controlled knowledge base to leverage intelligent question answering, Imindi is to gradually produce a decentralized mind network in which answers and questions are seamlessly integrated. Unlike the traditional take that Google and Wolfram Alfa represents, Imindi believes that there is no distinction between questions and answers. Both question and answer are nothing but a type of mind. Hence we may be able to apply mind to look for mind in contrast to employ questions to look for answers through an integrated mind network (called mindex by Imindi). This is one of the several major contributions that Imindi brings to the world.

Another contribution of Imindi is to construct mind asset. Mind asset is a concept that I coined with Adam Lindemann when studying Imindi. In additional to land and capital, we need to figure out a way of monetizing human mind to eventually resolve the conflict between the materialized capitalist world and the new metaphysical virtual world represented by the Web. Step by step, Imindi is trying to implement this scheme by creating the world a new adoption of monetization. If Imindi may grow steadily, users will gradually witness the details of our implementation, and it will foster a truly novel business model beyond Web 2.0.

In short, as Erick Schonfeld has shared today, there is still long way for Imindi to go beyond the present beta. The point is, however, that the potential of the service is truly unimaginable. What Adam and Imindi lack only right now is the investment that can maintain and prompt the progress of implementation. If Imindi is luckily given a chance, it could eventually be the door (in contrast to "a" door) towards the next generation Web.

Readers who are interested in learning more of Imindi could also read my previous discussion of the Imindi service in the last September after the TC50 conference. Certainly, do not forget to apply to be a beta tester!

Your online identity is a treasure inheritable

Everyday, we may witness some brilliant new business idea emerging. Legacy Locker shines today.

The intuition behind Legacy Locker is to prevent the loss of the private information after the death (especially in the case of sudden, unpredicted death) of individuals. This is a simple idea but very practical and valuable. When the Web has been involved deeper and deeper into our daily life, many of us do have much valuable information online that we do not want to lose even after our death. Typically, much of the information is what we have learned and saved as treasure. Hence we may wish the significant others to inherit the treasure when we pass away. Therefore it comes Legacy Locker.

This is an imperfect example of mind asset. But it is.

Swoopo: not an auction site

A $79.16 MacBook? ZDNet today has an interesting article about a new online "auction" service---swoopo. After reading the article and watching the site, I have a conclusion, however, that swoopo is indeed not an auction site. The site sells lottery!

The founders are the true "evil genius" as Sam Diaz said in his post. They have created a site selling lotteries in the form of "auction"! What they do is that they split everything into mini-slices, 75 cents per slice, number INDEFINITELY. Then they sell the slices in contrast to sell the product! Therefore, like any other lottery games, it actually does not matter how much the real product is worth. The only thing matters is how many people want to try their luck. Ideally, the more precious the product is, the more people may want to try the luck. There goes the scheme.

The $79.16 MacBook is really a small potato, though the site actually profited $4,638 from this $79.16 SALE! Don't be amazed, however, this is just exactly how lottery gains money.

Questioning Facebook's New Terms of Service

Facebook has updated its Terms of Services (TOC), which claims its rights over anything posted onto the site, forever (yes, even after the death of either you or your account, or both). A more detailed disclosure of the new term can be found here. My question is, however, why? What on earth is Facebook doing?

Facebook's reputation of user privacy protection is bad. The infamous Beacon had caught many arguments against this popular service. This time, however, the issue is beyond just privacy. It is also about the protection of intellectual property.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch posted later a statement from Mark Zuckerberg, in which Zuckerberg basically called people to "trust" Facebook of using the data properly into the future. But Mr. Zuckerberg, even if we might trust you and your company (though itself is very much questionable), you and your company have VIOLATED my right of protecting my own intellectual property! Please, this is not only just about privacy, it is also about the value of knowledge.

Whenever I share anything in any network, I should retain the right of ownership of the information. Whenever I keep using the service, as part of the deal for exchanging the service support, it is fair for the service (such as Facebook) to obtain the right of using my shared knowledge. Once I have deleted the account that means I no longer use the service, however, I should and must have the right to decide whether or not I will still give the permission to the previous service to use my knowledge. Facebook's action of eliminating this right from its users simply shows how arrogance and greed this service has become.

I will no longer use this service any more until it literally removes this policy from the term.

Wikipedia is NOT going to fall, at least in the foreseeable future

No, today's top news in Techmeme is not about Darwin, but an argument "Doomed: why Wikipedia will fail". Is it real? Sorry, I don't think so.

In the article, Eric Goldman (a Law Professor) predicted the inevitable failure of Wikipedia by arguing that by choosing either being "high quality" or keeping on being "open" the destination of Wikipedia is toward "a death spiral".

There is, however, a flaw in Goldman's statement. Why can't Wikipedia be both of "high quality" and "open" at the same time? The hypothesis that "the encyclopedia must choose between being high-quality or freely editable; it can't have both" itself is incorrect. To reach "high quality" we need human maintenance. To reach "open" we demand human participation. Nevertheless are the two goals not conflict to each other, they are supplement to each other.

The key of solving the dilemma is to make maintaining "high quality" be a profitable action! This improvement in the business model requires innovation and creative mind. But it is definitely a goal approachable. And it is another example of why the Web must move from UGC to UGA. When Wikipedia turns the "high quality" maintenance to be a user's profitable action, Wikipedia literally will have been converted its user-generated content (the Wikipedia entries) to user-generated asset (the profitable Wikipedia entries). But be careful, the "profitable" first means that the users who help Wikipedia maintain the respective entries may make profit by offering the help. Then the second it means Wikipedia may produce more revenue by upgrading its business model from UGC to UGA.

Is this hint enough to solve the dilemma? ;-) Yes.

ǝɔıʌɹǝs ƃuıʇsǝɹǝʇuı uɐ 'ǝlʇıʇ dılɟ

˙ɟlǝsɹnoʎ ʇno ʇı ʎɹʇ ˙unɟ ɹoɟ uɐɥʇ ǝɹoɯ pǝsn ǝq ʎɐɯ ǝɔıʌɹǝs sıɥʇ ʇnq ˙unɟ ɹoɟ ʇsnɾ

Just for fun. But this service may be used more than for fun. Try it out yourself.

Twine went public

Finally, Twine went out of beta.

To introduce this service, in Thinking Space I had written two pieces (first impression and second impression) of post that were synchronized with Twine's steps of going public. I am interested in this service because it is a representative Semantic Web application until now. After talking and debating Semantic Web for so many years, Twine is among the very few successful (or at least workable) real-world Semantic Web applications. Just by this mean, it deserves our special attention.

For readers who are still not familiar to Twine, Paul Miller had a fairly comprehensive discussion of the service at ZDNet that is worth of reading. Also, you may directly go for Twine.com to try the service by yourself. In this post, however, I continue my style of service analysis following the first impression and second impression.

The up side of the public version

1) from producing knowledge networks to producing interest networks

I vote this update of mind to be positive. Knowledge network is a great concept. Producing knowledge networks is probably the ultimate goal of Semantic Web. However, this intent is too broad to manage. How to project this broad concept of knowledge network onto a narrower and easier-to-manage alternative is a challenge. I am glad that Nova seems figuring out one---interest network.

Personal interest is a subset of personal knowledge. Moreover, personal interest is probably the most heavily cared portion of personal knowledge. By reducing knowledge network to interest network, it decreases the amount of potential information processing and narrows the size of the application domain. Hence it could significant improve the performance of the service if the service designers truly understand the meaning of this change.

2) emphasized personalization and privacy

Nova has emphasized that "What Twine will be doing will be to make excellent PERSONALIZED AND TOTALLY PERSONAL AND PRIVATE recommendations to users." Moreover, Nova mentioned that Twine would monetize its service through the coupling of recommendation and privacy protection. I agree to Nova. This is the right direction.

3) enthusiasm of the users

Nova reported that at present Twine users spend 12 minutes per session on average. This is a very encouraging number. It means that the service is sticky in some sense, or at least among the ones who really use the service it is sticky.

4) good quality of content

I use Twine regularly. Based on my experience, the quality of bookmarking service Twine currently performs is fairly good. When I search information inside a twine, the quality of searched results is satisfactory in general.

The down side of the public version

1) move towards 2.0 rather than to 3.0

I was said that Twine was likely a Web 2.5 application in its beta. Then I expected that Twine would gradually move towards 3.0 when it went public. However, my prediction is wrong. By inspecting this public version Twine, it is more similar to the other Web 2.0 applications than becoming a revolutionary new service. In the other words, Twine is moving towards 2.0 rather than to 3.0.

At the beginning we might instantly tell the difference between Twine and another standard Web 2.0 service. But now it has been very hard to tell why Twine is not another Web 2.0 application. By just adding a few semantic computation is not enough for Twine to claim Web 3.0.

Twine needs to hire some visionary service manager in contrast to (or in addition to) the experienced service manager it has now. By experienced Twine could only go for what is popular now. Only by visionary Twine might lead the trend into the future. Twine is losing innovation.

2) too low traffic flow in monthly visits

Based on the information provided by the CrunchBase, the number of Twine.com's monthly unique visitors at the past September is only about 50K. Be note that Thinking Space has monthly unique visitors in the same September more than 5K. In this month, the unique visitors at Thinking Space is close to 10K. But Thinking Space has no invested money at all, with respect to Twine.com has $13 million only in its series B round of fund raising. Isn't it a serious problem of Twine?



Referenced resources:

• Twine: the first impression (Thinking Space)
  
• Twine: the second impression (Thinking Space)
  
• Radar Networks opens Twine to the world with version 1.0 (by Paul Miller)
  
• Interest Networks (by Nova Spivack)
• Twine not launching a "Beacon like system" (by Nova Spivack)

yourBusinessChannel, the Web 2.0 marketing

yourBusinessChannel is a site to offer expert business development advice for entrepreneurs. The site claims to be the world's best collection of high quality online TV shows featuring business legends. Through yBC.tv, its online TV channel, some of the biggest and best respected names in business may give people free but serious guidance on almost every aspect of business. In short, I would tell the site being where the traditional marketing meets Web 2.0.

youBusinessChannel intends to build an online society of marketing experts and entrepreneurs. When entrepreneurs look for advises to expand their product market, yBC brings a team of marketing experts onto the table for help. At the same time, yBC provides an additional (and probably becoming more and more important with time) channel for marketing experts to broadcast themselves into varied rapidly growing business sectors. It is a win-win strategy and the business model is a typical Web 2.0 marketing.

Invited by Jacqui Gray, the Editorial Research Manager at yourBusinessChannel, and Andre Dent, the Global Syndication Manager, I have agreed to be one of the broadcast partners of yBC. Hence from time to time, I may post a few commentary on some of its shows here at Thinking Space. Certainly, however, my selected shows as well as my comments must be Web-related.

Live Thoughts at TechCrunch50 9/8 morning

I have finally been at the conference of TC50. The crowd is huge. It is said that there are more than 1,700 people in the conference room. The Internet connection is, however, crappy. It is until close to the end of the morning session finally the WiFi service became normal. Here are a few of my comments on the companies presented at the morning of TC50.

Shryk: This is a new service for children to learn how to save money and learn basic financial skills. The UI seems attractive and the goal is well, especially for family. The problem is, however, how the company is going to generate profit if it is a profitable corporation.

Hangout: The company develops virtual spaces for young kids to explore. The service helps bridge kids' online and offline experience. It is about virtual world and user-generated content. Kids can put their real pictures into the wall frames in the virtual world or plug in their real video into the TV and play in the virtual world. Moreover, the service also support mixing of music intrustments such as play drums when click on it and add the click of drum sound into music. This is quite a cool service and children might love to explore it. A question is, however, how the company is preparing to compete Second Life. Just be a Second Life for kids would be a risky strategy.

Blah girls: It is targeting teenage girls, who chase for Hollywood celebrities' life. It is like a mutual interactive blog site that regularly posts celebrity news and uses avatars to broadcast news and interact to the young blog readers. The service is about celebrity news, fashion, and all kinds of gossip inside Hollywood. An interesting (and probably most valuable) technology presented by this blog is to apply virtual characters to directly interact with real people in the world. Blog readers may get personal message from the three Blah Girls in animation. This service is a new approach to engage the life of virtual world into the real world. A shortcoming is the extensibility of the service. It is limited by its essential platform type as a standard Web 2.0 blog. If it may break this limit such as deploying avatars across platforms instead of solely copying videos, the product could be more interesting. At last, how many parents would support their children for this service?

Tweegee: This is actually the best service in this first section by my preference. However, I feel the founder have led the service to a wrong direction. In general, the service is about improve web experiences for young kids. The virtual world created by Tweegee is not a standard virtual world. In fact, it is a virtual world of training how to perform right in the virtual world of the Web. Tweegee may provide kid-specific emails, social networks, and all kinds of services in the adult society that help the new-age kids be quickly adopting the new digital world. This is a great idea. But the founders must know that it is not about creating a real social networking for kids. It is about training kids to know how to be a better member in the adult virtual world when growing up. By this sense, the company would better addressing itself be a non-profit organization than a commercial company. By cooperating with all kinds of education organizations, the service may have brilliant future. However, if the founders keep on their current dream, the service will die shortly.

Dotspots: This service is about engaging the wisdom of crowd to perform semantic annotation. By adding external content into the target news page, readers may be able to access more related comments and other services when reading the news. A significant problem of this service is the scalability. By the way, I am not sure why it is semantic annotation when there is nothing about semantics mentioned in the speech.

Angstro: This is a new professional social network that is to compete with LinkedIn. In essence, the service looks for the linked people name inside news and based on certain ranking criteria sending information to users. But how may the service efficiently distinguish people? The problem is non-trivial at all.

LiveHit: The CEO is a female lead company. The service is targeting 18-25 age young audience. It employs a digg-type but 3d-map-style display of pages. It ranks the popularity of users as well as pages. But it is still unclear how the service may survive through its uniqueness when there are so many powerful competitors there already.

Quant the news: This service uses machine learning, a powerful but dangerous term at the technological realm. A current service, StockMood, utilizes news feed to predict stock market. The computed positive mood will suggest the price of the stock up and the negative mood suggest opposite. But how large the user base might be? It would be an interesting question.

At the stage of TC50, Google finally announced a new service---Google news search. The theme is to make historic offline news become new-age online searchable information. The technology is based on original Google book search. Scan old newspapers, Make history be part of the new Web age. make the old history also be linked to each other. links beneath portion of newspaper.

Start to customize a new world

Google is launching a new browser. The news has been the headline at today's Techmeme. Instead of repeating the introduction of the service and the comic book, I want to share a few of my intuition after first hearing the service.

Intuitively, I agree to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch that Chrome is essentially targeting to "compete head on with Windows."

Chrome is more than a browser. Otherwise, its fate might eventually be the same as described by Hank Williams---"it will be a cause for celebration if I care at all even in 2010." But Chrome is more than a browser.

To this point, Nicolas Carr has an insightful discussion that Chrome is trying to fundamentally shifting the focus of Web browsers from page displaying to application deployment. Be note that in tradition application deployment is a key function of operating system instead of Web browser. This is thus Michael's meaning that Chrome is actually targeting Windows in contrast to Internet Explorer in its long run. Moreover, this is where the value of Chrome is.

Quite a few readers in varied major blog sites asked a common question in their comments: why on earth does Google want to launch Chrome? I would say that it is another sign of Web evolution and, again, Google shows its sharp intuition on catching the flow. (This is why Google keeps on its leading position of World Wide Web.)

I have emphasized many times at Thinking Space and I repeat it again: Web 2.0 is an inevitable Web evolutionary event in contrast to a business hype or a commercial buzz. A fundamental upgrade on the Web brought by Web 2.0 is the prevalence of portable Web services (or Web widgets), a typical Web-2.0-quality resources by my study of Web evolution. Due to this upgrade, the Web actually have shifted from copying data among Web sites to deploying services among Web sites. Service deployment rather than data display has been the central issue of the Web at this new stage. It is clearer and clearer that Web browsers may have to be given certain new meaning to compromise the new essential upgrade. The launch of Chrome, again, show that Google stands in front of many others.

Please allow me using my classic Web evolution analogy to conclude this post. After newborns grow to be pre-school kids, can we still limit them inside the cribs? If cribs no longer be suitable platform for the kids to display their talent, we need to create new facilities for them to show their new talent. This is thus why the revolution brought by Chrome is a new sign of Web evolution.

UPDATE: I edit this sentence using the Google Chrome. I must say that the interface is clean and nice. Thought it seems Chrome still has a few bugs to fix since it did not well display this page very well at first and it still cannot display the plugin of reader locations in Thinking Space. But I still love this new browser.

Referenced resources:

• Meet Chrome, Google's Windows Killer (TechCrunch)
• The cloud's Chrome lining (Rough Type)
• Chrome browser comic book (Google)
  

The future of Email

If there is a service that is used the most frequently by most of the Web users, it must be email. The invention of email is often thought to be the killer application of Internet. Without email, the adoption of Internet might have been delayed for several years.

Recently, however, email seems facing a little bit challenge. With the rise of new services such as instant message, wiki, Twitter, and all kinds of social networking functions, email is already no longer the solely primary choice for online communication. How should email be improved to satisfy the rapidly evolving Web?

First of all, we should not try to construct some super-email service that integrates all kinds of new service functions from IM to social networking. It would be a monster too heavy for users to drive, as Alex Iskold pointed out in his post.

Here are a few features I believe a new-generation email should be equipped. Email does not have to replace the other services. But email does need to improve itself.

editable after sent

Twine builds a very useful feature in its email service---users may edit its already-sent email. At least to me, this is a great feature. I am not sure how many of you have the experience that you want to revise an email just sent out. I often have. I believe that the feeling is especially regular among writers whose mother tongue is not English.

Moreover, many time I feel that I may only catch certain error after it is officially sent. This feeling might be based on some psychological reasons. But anyway, sending out an email containing improper verses or uncaught typos is not only embarrassing but some time also deadly if the email is important such as a job application.

Therefore, an upgraded email service should allow the senders to be able to revise and update their sent messages, especially before the mail being opened by the receivers. Twine is ahead on this service. But there are certainly other ways to solve the problem besides Twine's solution. For instance, we may simply allow users to send a new message to "replace" an old sent message. If the sent message has not been opened yet, the server can simply "replace" the old one by the new message; or otherwise, the sender may notice the server either deliver the "replacing" message as a normal new message or omit it totally.

I would suggest such a feature called "replace" be a new basic email function side-by-side with send and obtain emails.

tagging

Gmail allows users to label received emails. But why not encourage email senders to tag their messages at the first place? The title of email could not say much. With sender-generated tags, however, it greatly helps receivers filter their messages. And it also helps catch spammers when they abuse tags.

video email channels

A problem of combining video with email is that video files are often too big for emails to carry. But why videos must be sent. With the tagging function I just mentioned, regular email services may open a separate video email channel that allows people to record and listen to video emails. The regular email can simply be used to exchange the entry-point of the message in the channel with tags so that receivers may know what the shared channel is about.

Summary

There are actually more thoughts but I am a little bit tired of blogging more. One certain thing is, however, that we do expect a new-generation email as many other analysts have mentioned (see the referenced resources).

If only we may open our mind and think proactively, innovation is everywhere. Thinking Space is a place of creative thinking. I always believe that the value of a person is not mainly about what he has thought out. By contrast, the true value of a person is about what he is capable of active thinking and thus be able to continuously invent new ideas. Again, this human ability is the value of mind asset, a gift that every human being owns but only through everlasting practices it becomes more and more valuable.

Referenced resources:

• Wikipedia: Email
  
• Is email in danger? (Read/WriteWeb)
• I freed myself from E-Mail’s grip, (The New York Times)
• Email to fizzle out in five years? (Internet Evolution)
• Email is the enemy (ZDNet)
• How Gmail blocks spam (Google Operating System)
  

Cuil Search

Beginning from the last night, Cuil (pronounced "cool") starts to hit the headline of many technological blogs.

New Design of Interface

Cuil is experiencing a new design of magazine-style search-result display interface other than the "standard" list-style display of Web search results. The following is a screen shot by typing my name into the Cuil search. This change of design potentially may mean much more than attracting eyeballs.



In an earlier post at Alt Search Engines, I shared that a critical but often overlooked issue in the current Web search is the production of link resources, i.e., how to better formulate the generated links according to the user search requests. To clarify the issue, let me explain it using a metaphor. If one has a brilliant pearl but present it inside a crude lunchbox, how good it might be known? A brilliant pearl needs to have a well-designed box (such as the right one) that matches its superior quality. It is exciting to watch a breakthrough on this issue by Cuil.

This new design provides Cuil lots of potential. For example, each of the short related story shown at the first page of result could be more than just Web links. By contrast, it may be an entry point to a related Web thread and each story is describing the theme of the thread. A combination of Web search and Techmeme-style stories may bring Cuil users very different experiences from using, such as, Google for search.

New ranking and privacy

Another exciting thing to watch is that apparently Cuil has performed a different algorithm on ranking its search results. After Google's success, ranking based on objective link popularity is generally accepted as the foundation of page rank on the Web. Cuil, however, seems trying to apply a new standard of ranking over its stored over 120 billion (as it claimed) Web pages. As the result, from the previous figure we can see that the rank of my related links is very different from the rank of links returned by Google. Discarding the performance until now (anyway, Cuil is launched barely for one day but Google has optimized its results for more than a decade), I strongly support Cuil's attempt. We want to have an alternative solution which does provide us DIFFERENCE. On the other hand, if a new search engine ranks the Web the same way as Google, how could we be convinced that it might do better than Google? Therefore, no matter whatever Cuil has chosen a correct path to walk and we wish it the best luck in the future.

Cuil also claimed some exciting news about its advanced privacy protection technology. Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land uncovered that Cuil search engine would not log IP information. Be note that Google, Yahoo and Ask.com all perform this IP log in their search engines. Cuil's claim helps protect users' privacy on both of the publishing and surfing on the Web. I recommend this improvement especially to the places where information censorship is rigorous.

Still long way to go

Despite of all the improvements, Cuil still have a long way to go before it may indeed threaten Google. For example, it seems that search engine repeatedly looks for the same links and there must be some severe bugs about how to break a circles in graphs in its algorithm.

The following is the second page of the Cuil search results by input my name. Comparing to the first page in the former figure, we can see that the second page repeats quite a few links that have already shown in the first page. I have tested Cuil by the other queries and it seems that this is a bug generally occurred.



Certainly Cuil has more than this problem. But I am still looking forward to its future. Although Sullivan only showed "cautiously optimistic" to the future of Cuil, I think the value of Cuil would not be the precision of its search results. I agree to Sullivan that it is hard to believe that Cuil can do significantly better on bringing back more accurate results than Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft by employing the similar infrastructure of Web search. On the other hand, however, Cuil does show us that it may help build final link resources in better quality. Only if Cuil can continuously convince people that it can bring people alternatives (even though no better results) that they can hardly get from Google, Cuil would be a success at the end because we want to hear different voices.

Genome: rethinking of Social Networking

Social networking is a fascinating topic on Web 2.0. Despite of the various social network sites, there are still open questions about social networking in general. Vladislav Chernyshov, one of the co-founders of Genome along with Andrew Chernyh and Dmitry Gorpinchenko, discussed several of these issues in his blog.

In the post, Vlad argued five major problems in the current social networking practices: (1) the lack of sufficient privacy protection, (2) the overflowing of social message, (3) the low quality friendship maintenance, (4) the poor performance of advertisement filtering, and (5) the lack of identity management. Nevertheless are all the issues critical to the future of social networking, Vlad and his peers founded Genome to solve the problems. The company is at Novosibirsk, Russia. Invited by Vlad, I am a member of the advisory board.

The Genome service aims to solve the problem of identity management first. From the solution it will gradually cover the other four issues as well. The essential Genome service well integrates social networks, instance messagers, contact managers altogether and makes the integrated individual identity be accessible anytime from anywhere in the world. In person, I call the service a real Web-3.0 effort since it directly addresses the primary Web evolutionary issue at the level of Web 2.0---the contradiction between unstopping quantitative increase of Web 2.0 resources and the short of managing personal resources cross various Web-2.0 sites. Thus, Genome is not another Web 2.0 service. By contrast, it will be a real Web 3.0 service once it is fully developed.

In summary, Genome shows that we really need to start rethinking social networking to its next generation. The flood of social network sites has gradually made us more trouble than benefit. As Vlad pointed out, with more social networks, the quality of friendship decreases, the individual privacy leaks, the personal identity is under risk, and let it alone the distraction of increasing pokes and advertisement from all kinds of "friends". Genome will help solve all the problems. Just keep on watching.

YokWay moves forward

Invited by Stephan Osmont, co-founder of YokWay, I did a try on this new service about collaborative bookmarking.

In the few months, we have seen several new services on bookmarking and online data management. The hottest buzz right now is Twine and FriendFeed. The less known YokWay, however, has the potential to be a serious competitor.

The YokWay service allows people to share their bookmarked items with friends. Yokway adopts the Digg fashion that requires users to post items one at a time instead of the fashion of FriendFeed that automatically pulls items for users through subscribed RSS services.

Once an item is posted, it is categorized into "What's Yoking?", which is similar to such as "What's dugg?" or "What's twined?" Users can conveniently switch the viewing perspective among the Yokings made by themselves, by their specified friends, or by the general public. YokWay allows users to add comments for an item and to vote for the items based on an scale up to five stars.

One thing that sets YokWay apart from Digg is to organize stored items with topics. YokWay calls them "My Sharing Circles". Anybody can create a new "Sharing Circle". And anybody can choose to "subscribe" to an existing circle and/or "join" an existing circle. By "subscribe", readers choose to follow the topic without the privilege of posting on the topic. By "join", readers ask for the right of posting on this topic. The request of "subscribe" is granted immediately when it is asked. By contrast, the request of "join" must be approved by the owner of the circle.

The sharing circles in YokWay is semantically identical to the twines in Twine. But the implemented functions of sharing circles is weaker than those of twines. By using Twine, we can flexibly specific tags in various categories and easily share items among twines. YokWay has not provided such a strong flexibility. In fact, during my test it is even not straightforward for me to add an existing item to a newly created circle. YokWay must need to enhance the implementation of these functions in order to engage more users.

In the email, Stephan emphasizes to me that YokWay is "sharing information relies on a best of breed semantic engine that will make Yokway a potential leader in the Web 3.0 era." I am impressed by the claim but the beta service has not clearly illustrated how the new semantic technologies have been engaged in use. For example, tagging is weakly supported by YokWay. Automatic machine tagging is a particular demonstration of performing semantic technologies in a Web document management system. But I cannot find this demonstration in the current YokWay beta service, let it alone the other more complicated use of semantic technologies.

As what I have suggested for Twine, new service providers must think of innovative ways to illustrate the use of new technologies through creative user interface design. Otherwise, users can hardly be impressed by the new technologies when they cannot feel. Twine has this problem in this architecture. YokWay, however, has even more problems on this issue. It seems that YokWay tries to produce a better Web-resource-management service by mixing several of the good design issues made by Digg, Twine, and FriendFeed altogether. This type of mixing is a good strategy unless the designers themselves already have a unique vision over the topic. Otherwise, it is easier to be a compromise that the service itself loses its identity. Such a problem of losing identity is a deadly issue for any new service. Unfortunately, however, I feel that YokWay has this problem in serious.

Final Address

In summary, YokWay is a new service for managing data on the Web. It tries to integrate many handy existing Web services into a uniform platform so that users can get the best experiences on organizing their Web resources through the service. I must confess that the service is so far so good on its main goal and it actually provides several really impressive features such as the integration of Google Map service within comments.

Besides all the good things YokWay provides for users, the most severe problem of YokWay at this moment is the lack of identity. The service is not impressive in its architecture comparing to its direct competitors such as Digg, Twine, and FriendFeed. YokWay tries to include all the good features of its competitors but eventually it loses its own uniqueness. When I use YokWay, I can see that this feature likes Twine and another feature likes FriendFeed. But I would like to ask what the identity of YokWay is.

The most crucial thing for YokWay at this moment is to hire a truly visionary thinker to direct the design of a new architecture. Through my testing, I am certain that YokWay has good enough technology to support its growth. A visionary thinker may immediately leverage the service to a distinctive level by forming an impressive identity for the service.