imindi (2): what indeed is imindi?

Now let's forget the nonsense made by Mark Cuban but focus ourselves onto the main issue---why is imindi brilliant? Is imindi an unrealistic dream, or is it a service that have no financial future in near term, or is it something else?

I, probably more than anybody else in this world (even including possibly the two co-founders themselves at some sense), might be able to answer these questions. Unlike the two co-founders who in some sense have been over-occupied by their intuition, I may interpret the power and reality of the service from a much more objective viewpoint. So let me start to explain my view over this fantastic revolution.

(1) imindi is about embodying thinking.

Many people get afraid of this statement. "Get into your head", it looks like a dangerous term. Indeed, however, it is not frightening at all. For people still doubt of it, please watch the following question:

are you afraid of blogging?

Blogging, one of the most popular Web services ever, is indeed about embodying human thinking---turning authors' thoughts into blog posts. If people are not afraid of blogging, why should they be afraid of authoring a few thoughts using imindi?

If it is said "Imindi wants to get into your head," isn't blogging already getting into your head at a very profound level? What on earth can another service dig into people's mind deeper than blogging?

(2) imindi is similar to mini-blogging.

However, imindi is not a traditional style blogging. If we have to compare, the imindi service is closer to mini-blogging. imindi is a compact new way of authoring thoughts.

In this busy and extremely information overloading age, Twitter has demonstrated the power of mini-blogging by saving people time and triggering active thinking because users have to encode their thoughts within 140 characters. While quite a few skeptics questioned (some still are questioning) whether it could be successful, the popularity of Twitter until now shows the success of mini-blogging.

In similar, imindi restricts any thought unit to be specified into no more than FIVE words. Unlike Twitter, however, imindi allows users to describe a thought into a graph containing multiple thought units in contrast to a sentence of statement or question. With some simple graphical display of thoughts, imindi has at least identical power of knowledge expression as what mini-blogging can express.

(3) imindi saves time and help recording thoughts.

Does imindi cost investing more time as Mark Cuban accused? Not at all.

Suppose one has a thought in mind and wants to share it. Option 1 is to write a blog post about it, and Option 2 is to scratch a brief outline of the thoughts. Which option would cost less time?

For ones with just a little bit experience of writing, they may conclude almost immediately that Option 1 must cost more time than Option 2. It is indeed fairly sophisticated and time-consuming to convert a few main points to be a fluent article; every writer knows it.

Moreover, unexperienced writers often lose their points when writing articles because the processing of producing articles from a few thoughts is just non-trivial. Blogging is a hard work. Good blogging requires professional training of writing. Even with all of that, blogging is still a time-consuming job.

On the other hand, poor skill of writing does not equal to poor thoughts. Many people have great thoughts but they cannot deliver the thoughts since they cannot write well. At the same time, it would be much easier for them to just list a few main points of their thought since it does not require the technique of writing sentences and paragraphs.

Writing a list of main points of a thought is, however, exactly what imindi is asking. So, at least to those hundreds of millions of bloggers all over the world, imindi must cost them less time to express thoughts than writing blog posts.

Moreover, for billions of people who are not blogging, isn't it very much likey that a decent percentage of these people might join the force of thought contribution since imindi has now freed them from the requirement of high skill writing?

Are we excited now? Indeed, we are just warmed up. Some revolution is about to start.

(4) imindi automatically connects similar embodied thoughts.

This is the first revolution imindi brings to the world.

There is a breathtaking beauty in imindi's implementation of connecting embodied thoughts. It encourages the ambiguity of thought connection!

If you are not a true IT guy or if you are not a real geek, you may not feel how great the revolution is (though it is only one of the several revolutions imindi carries, and not even the greatest one). But if you allow me to quote a sentence written by Professor Seth Lloyd at MIT in his illuminating book "Programming the Universe", you will get it.

"... for computers, ambiguity is a bug. ... The ambiguity of human language is not a bug, it's a bonus!" (pg. 27)

Should I say more? On Semantic Web and artificial intelligence, computer scientists have struggled on solving the ambiguity of knowledge expression for many years. The reason is straight---teach computers to think while computers are bad at handling ambiguity. As the result, computer scientists have no other choices but to make ambiguity a bug and try to solve it in programming. Years after, many young generation computer geeks have nearly forgotten the origin of the problem by blindly following what they learned from textbook that ambiguity is a bug to solve.

But here is the critical point---for real thinking, ambiguity is a bonus but not a bug. Hence, the change is eventually asked by someone who is not a computer geek, such as a neuroscientist, Dr. Galen Kaufman, a co-founder of imindi. From his profession, Galen has intuitively insisted on constructing the mind index of imindi service (called mindex) in a different way (actually closer to real neuron connections in human brains) that normal computer scientists may not adopt. Without disclosing the technological details, the consequence is that mindex favors the mixture of semantics, i.e., the increase (but not decrease) of ambiguity of semantics in mindex. Be honest, both the professional developers of imindi and me have not gotten the point of design at the beginning. I finally got the point only after reading Prof. Lloyd's book. This is indeed the beauty of human thinking. And this is the first step that makes imindi service unique.

imindi actually empowers computers to improve human thinking in contrast to enhance computers to simulate human thinking. imindi is working on human intelligence but not artificial intelligence.

I believe all of the panelists, including the most geeky Kevin Rose, missed the point because the founders of imindi failed to tell them. Here is, however, a very unfortunate double curse of knowledge. What intuitive to imindi founders are novel to the geeky panelist such as Kevin, what intuitive to Kevin is unknown to the imindi founders. As the result, great innovation becomes a classic mess of miscommunication.

(5) imindi discloses and constructs a new layer of the Web.

In essence, such a layer essentially exists but implicitly. But imindi service turns it to be explicit. This is an attempt of disclosing the implicit web.

On the superficial level, imindi is constructing a web of human mind. In its real meaning, as suggested by the company name and visioned by the founders' vision, imindi is constructing a web of individuals, i.e., "i"s. That is, the company is "i-mind-i".

Be responsible to the interest of the founders, I would not disclose more details of this vision publicly in this post. I have participated much thinking of constructing the vision. I must say that it is another revolution. By discussing the details with the co-founders, I was really amazed that imindi turned many difficult problems to be much easier pieces to solve. I just cannot help expecting the future of imindi.

(6) Besides these aspects, imindi has several other great innovations that requires more human and financial resources to develop. After deeply shared with the imindi co-founders, I have to say that I am deeply impressed how far imindi can carry us. The most important thing is, however, none of them are wild dreams. From a professional computer scientist's point of view, all the innovations are realizable because of the unique vision and design of infrastructure created by the imindi co-founders.

By the way, after understanding these described innovation, does anybody still doubt of the business model of imindi?

imindi is a revolution. If the two innovators of imindi are killed on the stage of Silicon Valley by a few irresponsible dirty words, I would rather say that it is one of the most shameful events in the history of Web innovation.

The Implicit Web

(This article is cross-posted at ZDNet's Web 2.0 Explorer.)
(watch the article also in Chinese, translated by the author)

Implicit web is a new concept coined in 2007. Due to the first Defrag conference right now, discussion of this new term is timely.

Generally this concept implicit web intends to alert us a fact that besides all the explicit data, services, and links, the Web engages with much more implicit information such as which data users have browsed, which services users have invoked, and which links users have clicked. This type of information is often too boring and tedious to be human readable. So, inevitably, this type of information is only implicitly stored (if stored) on the Web. The implicit web intends to describe a network of this implicit information.

Implicitness Everywhere

Implicit information is everywhere. Implicit information on the Web is about things to which human web users have paid attention. For example, it is about which web pages are frequently read, how often they are read, and who read them. It is also about which services are frequently invoked, how often they are invoked, and who invoked them. Consider the number of web users and how many activities everybody has done daily on the Web, the amount of implicit information must be astonishing. The implicit information co-exists with every web page, every web service, and every web link. In short, great amount of implicitness co-exists with every little piece of explicitness on the Web.

Implicit does not mean insignificant or unimportant. By contrast, implicit web information is often valuable and even crucial in various situations. For example, implicit information of click rates can help editors decide which news are the most popular ones and thus they should put these news on the front page. In similar, the same type of implicit click rates can help salespeople decide which merchandises are among the greatest demanding and so they can arrange the next supply line.

Many companies have already started to collect implicit information and they take benefits from it. Alex Iskold had written a compact introduction on how some companies have utilized implicit information in their products. One well-known example is Amazon.com, which always lists related buyer recommendations with each of its online merchandise. "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought," many readers must be familiar to this label. And more importantly, many web users do care of the content underneath this label. This is a typical example of how implicit web information helps.

Amazon is not the only company that benefits from implicit information. Amazon is not one of the few companies that benefit from implicit information. In fact, nowadays almost every website that sells something, from baby toys to cars, has some back-end mechanism on analyzing the traffic (a typical implicit information) and adjust their sales plan based on the analysis. Implicitness is indeed everywhere.

Connect Implicitness

Implicitness is everywhere, but is fragmented everywhere. Implicit information on the Web is not connected. This is a problem.

Until now, implicit web information is generally separately stored, typically by individual companies. For example, both Gap.com and jcrew.com have their own stored visitor history but not shared to the other, although we may imagine that this information must be well connectible since both companies sell apparel and accessories. Someone may argue that Gap and J. Crew are competitors. So let us switch the pair to be Banana Republic and Victoria's Secret. The products of these two companies are well complement (in contrast to compete) to each other. But still the implicit information is isolated to itself, despite that both sides can benefit by connecting this independent implicit information. Readers can find many more this type of examples.

If sharing implicit information among big companies is still questionable (because these big boys hardly believe that they could get help from their little sisters), this type of sharing is much more critical to small websites. There are numerous individual sites that cannot utilize themselves well enough from their own implicit information because they are too small in size. At the same time, however, there are no effective way for them to share and find helpful implicit information, though everybody knows that there is plenty of this information on the Web.

All these discussions lead to one demand: we need the implicit web, which is not there yet. The goal of the implicit web is to defragment all the fragments of implicitness (where the name Defrag is gotten for the conference). But how can we indeed connect all the different types of implicitness on the Web to be a coherent implicit web? This is a grand challenge to the newly formed community of implicit web research. We do not have a clear answer yet.

No matter whatever, however, the solution to the question must be beyond web links. The implicit web engages with complex types of semantics. The amount of information on the implicit web is gigantic. The implicit Web is also very much dynamic. The traditional model of web link is too simple, too shallow, and too static to deal with all these challenges at the same time. We need big, creative thoughts to store and link all the implicitness.

The greatest potential problem to the implicit web is privacy. To companies, some implicit information may be too confidential to be shared. To individual persons, some implicit information may be too private to be public. We need innovative methods of privacy control on the implicit web.

Implicit Web in nutshell

In summary, I briefly list my beliefs about the implicit web.

1. The implicit web is a network that defragments every piece of implicitness on the explicit web, which is the generally known World Wide Web itself.

2. If the explicit web reveals the static side of human knowledge through posted data, services, and links, the implicit web reveals the dynamic side of human knowledge by recording how users access these data, services, and links.

3. The explicit web engages collective human intelligence. The implicit web engages collective human behaviors.

4. The implicit web is not part of the Semantic Web, but they are closely related. If the Semantic Web constructs a conceptual model of World Wide Web, the implicit web constructs a behavior model of World Wide Web.