The Difference between Yahoo and Facebook

Web 2.0 is a web of platform; this is a commonly accepted viewpoint. But what does a platform mean to particular companies? The answers are not necessarily the same.

For example, do the platform of Facebook and the platform of Yahoo (if it would ever be built) mean the same? In a recent report from Bits, a blog hosted by The New York Times, Jerry Yang explained Yahoo's interpretation of platform. "A business that has a set of standards that allows a set of companies to participate and find benefit from it," he said. This is, however, exactly what the Facebook Platform is: "Facebook Platform is a set of APIs and tools that provides a way for external applications to access Facebook content on behalf of Facebook users." So did Yang suggest that every platform was the same?

What is the difference between Yahoo and Facebook? Yahoo produces web resources by itself, while the present Facebook does not. Facebook is only a social playground. Facebook itself produces few unique data but only service functions. Facebook very much relies on user-contributed data to survive. Yahoo is, however, a major web-resource manufacturer. Yahoo produces numerous unique consumable data to the public every day. Yahoo can survive without user-contributed data. But Yahoo can certainly live better when effectively engaged with user-contributed data. This is the difference between Yahoo and Facebook at present.

Facebook knows its strengths and weaknesses. So the strategy of its platform is to be fully open and maximizes user contribution. This policy both facilitates the usage of its main products (services) and minimizes its main shortcomings (lack of data production line by itself).

Yahoo can simply clone this successful policy, as Yang said. But it is a pity if Yahoo would not adjust this policy with its own strength. As we have discussed, Yahoo produces a lot of data. Yahoo could transform its data production line to user-accessible services. By this transformation, Yahoo is not only a social-network platform as Facebook is, but also a data production platform that Facebook is not. Jeff Jarvis suggested that Yahoo should "turn absolutely every — every — piece of Yahoo into a widget any of us could export and use on our own sites." This is what Yahoo really should approach.

Summary

Although the web of a platform is a general concept, individual platforms are different. Every company should design their own unique platform based on their own strengths and weaknesses. Simply cloning others may lead to a tremendous waste of its resources. This case study between Yahoo and Facebook is an example.

Current Status of Web Evolution by Watching Web 2.0 Summit

The 2007 Web 2.0 Summit conference has come to its end. Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb has summarized the conference by saying that this conference is a success but lack of a focused theme. By contrast, he listed a timeline of Web 2.0 as follows.

       * Oct '04: Web 2.0 is Born
       * Oct '05: Web 2.0 Tips (a.k.a. "cautious optimism and cynical buzz")
       * Nov '06: Web 2.0 Matures
       * Apr '07: Web 2.0 Goes Mainstream

I, however, made a complement to this timeline.

       * Oct '07: Web 2.0 Starts to be flourishing

Impression of Web 2.0 Summit 2007

Web 2.0 is starting to be flourishing! This is the most important signal delivered by this Web 2.0 Summit 2007. Technologies are ready, and it's time to exploit human creativity on manipulating these technologies. This is what this conference tells the world.

That Web 2.0 is starting to be flourishing explains why it seems that this conference is short of a focused theme. Web 2.0 is now going everywhere. Different people are thinking of how to apply this vision to their professional realms and make profits from this hype. It thus causes the diversity of topics, and so the theme is hard to be focused.

But, isn't the lack of a theme itself also a theme? Yes, it is. Diversity dominates this conference. People all talk about themselves. It is short of extra energy to care of a common theme to everyone. This is the sign of being flourishing.

Current Status from the View of Web Evolution

So what does this current status mean? I want to share my view based on my vision of web evolution. I have three predictions based on the observation of this Web 2.0 Summit.

1. We are now at the stage of rapid quantitative accumulation of Web-2.0 resources.

The core technologies of Web 2.0 mature. The rest of the work is how to maximize the usage of these technologies. From traditional big boys such as Microsoft to numerous small startups, everyone is trying their own way to dig gold from this Web 2.0 hype. In the following few year, we are going to see tremendous increase of quantity of Web-2.0 resources on the Web. Now it is the best to produce revenue from Web-2.0 products.

2. The preparation of transition to Web 3.0 has begun.

I emphasize that it is the preparation but not the transition itself. At present online Web-2.0 resources are still too few on both its quantity and diversity to really trigger the next transition. As we know, sufficient quantitative accumulation is the prerequisite of a qualitative transition. The general philosophical theory tells us that a qualitative transition can never happen without such a sufficient quantitative accumulation, and certainly we are not there yet.

This observation tells why Twine is still only a Web-2.0 or at most a Web-2.5 product but not a true Web-3.0 product. In some sense, Twine likes an early-born baby and the entire environment has not been ready to its healthy growth yet. But Twine is a sign that Web 3.0 is ahead.

3. Web-2.0 bubble is unavoidable, but probably it is also necessary.

In order to accelerate the emergence of Web 3.0, we need more Web-2.0 companies (instead of more Web-3.0 startups) at present. It sounds controversy. But remember that no Web-3.0 companies can exist before the world of Web 2.0 has been flourishing enough. Since no one knows how much flourishing is enough, only over-flourishing can tell us that it has already been enough. By over-flourishing, we get a bubble. This is thus the dilemma.

Web 2.0 stands on the flourishing world of Web 1.0, and it was so flourishing that caused a bubble. Similarly, Web 3.0 must stand on the flourishing world of Web 2.0, and there is no other way to make Web 3.0 happen. By this mean, Web-2.0 bubble is not only unavoidable, but also necessary. In order to survive from this coming bubble, however, any ambitious Web-2.0 company must prepare its own shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 when at present it is still focusing on producing Web-2.0 products.

Metadata or Hyperdata, Link or Thread, What is a Web of Data?

This is my most recent post at Semantic Focus. In this post I shared my view of a web of data. The following are selected quotes from the article.

A web of data is a network of data whose local characters are specified by metadata and global characters are specified by hyperdata.

A web thread is a reference to a named web location. Unlike a web link, a web thread connects arbitrary numbers of objects at the same time. In contrast to unidirectional, a web thread is omnidirectional. Data in a thread is automatically connected to all other data in the same thread. All the data connected by the same web thread mutually supplements each other in semantics.

With web threads, do we still need web links in a web of data? The answer is yes. Web threads cannot completely replace web links. Web links have their irreplaceable semantics.

But isn't "incorrectness" a synonym of creativeness? If we want to engage collective intelligence in a web of data, allowing and encouraging subjective (and biased) assignment of web links is fundamental to explore human creativity.

In summary, a web of agents is what ordinary users can see about the Semantic Web at the front end, while a web of data is what professional developers understand to be the essence of the Semantic Web at the back end. These two presentations tell a common story from two different sides.

If you are interested in my interpretation about "a web of data," check out the full story at Semantic Focus.

Twine, the first impression

One big news flying over the blogosphere this past weekend is the first public announcement of Twine. Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb asked whether it is the first mainstream Semantic Web application.

I have not gotten the chance to test the beta myself yet, and I know that neither do many of my readers too at this moment. By analyzing released information in various blogs, I would like to share my first impression of Twine. I may post a follow-up of this post later when I get to know better about Twine. Unless otherwise mentioned, the figures used in this post are from the references I cite at the end of this post.

Twine in a nutshell

This is my one-sentence impression on what Twine is after reading all the referenced posts.

Twine produces a personalized knowledge network for every user by allowing them to find, share, and organize information from people they trust.

As usual, I unfold this sentence so that we may peek the core of Twine.

Twine produces knowledge network. This is the main goal of Twine. That a knowledge network versus a normal social network is What-You-Know versus Who-You-Know. Peter Rip had a fairly well explanation of this issue.

The knowledge networks produced by Twine are personalized. This clause actually has two folds of meanings. If we only read these words, it tells that Twine leverages the management of personal knowledge and improves the usage of knowledge for individual users. If we think of this expression deeper, very likely the knowledge management inside Twines may hardly run across the boundaries of individual knowledge networks at the semantic level. In fact, "personalization" is a comparatively weak term in the realm of knowledge management because globalization is much harder than personalization. But certainly this claim from Twine is reasonable and understandable. (It would be less believable if Twine claims that it could effectively manage knowledge across all the knowledge networks.) Indeed I have already been very much impressed on this claim Twine has made.

A knowledge network in Twine allows users to find, share, and organize information. The keyword in this clause is users, i.e. humans find, share, and organize (with help from machines) rather than machines find, share, and organize. It shows that we are still half way to the real Semantic Web.

Information in a knowledge network is from people who are trusted by the owners of the knowledge network. Obviously, the quality of any knowledge network is related to the quality of its content. The quality of content is, however, related to whether the information providers are trustworthy. Recently, Paul Miller and I had a talk and both of us also agreed that the trust issue must be fundamental to any form of networks on the future Web. Obviously Twine has already addressed this issue for its knowledge networks. How does Twine actually has modeled and implemented trust? This is an interesting question waiting to be revealed.

Impressions from Released Screen-shots

Now we look at two screen-shots and take a close feeling about Twine.



The first screen-shot shows a standard front page of a Twine. The design is familiar to other Web 2.0 sites. The page contains various imports, which could be seen as widget components. On the right side, there are standard tags and list of friends. In general, this screen-shot hardly reveals why Twine is more than another Web 2.0 site.

I am a little bit disappointed about this front-page design. The most important shortcoming is that there is lack of new thought in the design. It is hard to convince me that this site is a new-generation product as it is advertised.



This second screen-shot reveals something new. Typically, it shows an automated annotation mechanism behind the screen. It seems that the Radar's semantic engine can automatically annotate new imports based on existing user-specified tags. Annotated data are stored in RDF files, as Twine is advertised. The interface does not reveal whether there is an underlying ontology management mechanism that may automatically upgrade taxonomies based on users' activities. From the pragmatic point of view, I guess that there might be pre-constructed small ontologies or taxonomies (e.g. learned from Wikipedia) in Radar's semantic engine. Based on user-specified tags, the Radar's semantic engine can automatically (or semi-automatically) select proper taxonomies for users. Then these taxonomies become the seeds for further annotation and query requests.

This screen-shot demonstrates that Twine is beginning to distinguish itself from the other Web-2.0 products. The integration of semantic-web technologies brings new elements to the design and further enriches user experiences on leveraging web information management.

From the two screen-shots, we have seen the use of novel semantic web technologies in Twine. The main problem is, however, that Twine seems only mechanically lay the techniques together. What is the philosophy underneath these techniques and what kind of revolution can these improvement bring to the world? Unfortunately, Twine does not provide a clear answer. As the result, "Twine looks like it's just del.icio.us 2.0," quoted from Tim O'Reilly's comment for his own post about Twine. This is also exactly my feeling after carefully reading all the discussions about Twine up to now.

Semantics behind Twine

Which philosophy does Twine want to bring to the world? This is the grand question to Radar Networks and Nova Spivack.

What I can see is that Twine is still aiming to leverage a web of platform. Certainly this goal is timely and exciting at this moment. But if Twine stops its goal only at the web of platform, Twine is not (and will not be) a Web-3.0 product as it is advertised. Twine is an excellent Web-2.0 product; or maybe we could call it a Web-2.5 product because it shows inevitable distinction to many other Web-2.0 products. But unfortunately, it is not a Web-3.0 product because Twine so far does not bring us revolutionary thoughts. Web 3.0 is more than just a plain layout of new technologies. Web 3.0 must be a revolutionary layout of new technologies. A revolutionary layout means to bring a new philosophy to the world; but Twine fails in this ultimate goal.

To understand revolution, let's compare the current Twine to the Google when it was risen and we can understand the lack of Twine at present. The greatness of Google is not because of its PageRank algorithm. Nevertheless is the algorithm a magnificent contribution to the world, Google changes the philosophy of the Web. Google redefined itself to be a center hub of a social network of users who use Google products instead of defining itself to be a traditional entry-portal to the Web. This upgrade of philosophy lifts Google from a 1.0 company to a leading 2.0 company. This is called revolution. So far Twine has not shown a sign of this type of revolution. By the way, I am not sure whether Yahoo had really understood this revolution until now.

If Radar Networks would like to welcome my comments, I would suggest changing the name "Twine" to "Twin". Check dictionary again if you are curious of these two words. Email me if you really want to know my opinion, which is hard to be explained in short sentences and out of the focus of this post. (Certainly I do not insist on literally changing the name. But they'd better change the philosophy underneath the name if their goal is really about Web 3.0.)

Summary

Twine is an exciting product. Although this Twine beta is not a Web-3.0 product yet, it is already one of the greatest Web-2.0 products up to the present. Moreover, we must not neglect that Twine still has a huge space to grow before it gets out of its beta version. Twine has the potential to grow to be a real Web-3.0 product. The question is what kind of ultimate philosophy Nova Spivack and his peers are preparing to bring to the world. Let's be optimistic to the future of Twine.

References

• Twine official website, Twine Introduction
  
• Nova Spivack (founder of Radar Networks), What a Week!
  
• ==================================================
  
• Danny Ayers, Radar Networks decloak: Twine
  
• Nicholas Carr, Twine: a social network with brains
  
• Dan Farber, Radar Networks weaves semantic Twine
  
• Martin LaMonica, Radar Networks' Twine: Semantic Web meets information overload
  
• Brad Linder, Twine: A social network built on the semantic web dls interview
  
• Richard MacManus, Twine: The First Mainstream Semantic Web App?
  
• Paul Miller, Web 2.0 Summit - tying it all together with Twine
  
• Chris Morrison, Radar’s Twine: A semantic complement to Google
  
• Tim O'Reilly, Web2Summit: Radar Networks Unwinds twine.com
  
• Shelly Powers, Semantic to Go
  
• Peter Rip, Initial Experience with Twine
  
• Julie Sloane, Radar Networks To Unveil Its Semantic Web App, Twine
  

Many other related discussions can be found at here.

Social Network: devoting to plebeians or elites?

Not a social network, but a business networking tool. This was what Linkedin CEO Dan Nye spoke to New York Times recently. "Not a social network!" Is there anything wrong within the statement? Actually, nothing went wrong. What Linkedin really want to express (but be shy to say) is that Linkedin is aiming to be a social network devoting to elites but not plebeians.

By contrast, Facebook's policy of open platform (or open API) is the manifesto of devoting to the general public, i.e. plebeians. Anyone can get a free place for their dreams of social networking. The realization of dreams, however, may be inelegant and lack of well maintenance. But open platform gives rewards to creative and diligent minds, even if they are short of money and their plans are lack of consideration.

Plebeians do not care much about security. As a matter of fact, plebeians are often more willing to try unknown applications than the rich elites. Why? If one does not own much at the beginning, how much could he lose to the end?

Certainly noble elites think of things in some other ways. They own much, and thus they worry more. Noble elites care much of confidential. They want to be safer, i.e. to be more closed to themselves, even within a "social" network.

Well, I guess Linkedin has properly found their customers. However, isn't being noble also equivalent to being solitude and short of choices? So will Linkedin be.

Web Evolution

(last updated, June 10th, 2008)

Many people agree on Web evolution, but few take it seriously. As a term, "Web evolution" is commonly used. But few people have thoughtfully studied its principles, i.e. why and how the Web evolves. Even after the initiative of Web Science, Web evolution, supposed to be a major branch of Web Science, is still lack of considerable attention. For example, Wikipedia, the most popular online encyclopedia, does not have an entry of Web evolution till now (last checked June 10th, 2008). We need to change this situation.

A Brief History

One of the early attempts of formalizing the concept of evolution on the Web was done by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of World Wide Web. In 1998, he explained the importance of evolvability of Web technology. In short, we need to preserve spaces for Web technologies so that they can be continuously upgraded to compromise new requests. According to Tim, "evolvability" is one of the two fundamental goals of all W3C technologies (the other goal is "Interoperability"). Berners-Lee also emphasized that the key evolutionary issues at the meantime should be language evolution and data evolution. Within the context of his discussion, the term "evolvable" was actually closer to the meaning of "extensible" than the meaning of "evolutionary".

A more recent discussion about Web evolution was at the panel "Meaning on the Web: Evolution or Intelligent Design?" at Edinburgh, Unite Kingdom during the WWW-2006 conference. This panel invited five well-known web researchers, Ron Brachman, Dan Connolly, Rohit Khare, Frank Smadja, and Frank van Harmelen. In the description of this panel, it was written as follows.

"should meaning on the Web be evolutionary, driven organically through the bottom-up human assignment of tags? Or does it need to be carefully crafted and managed by a higher authority, using structured representations with defined semantics?"

The evolution of meaning specifications on the Web is a central issue of Web evolution; and this issue is particularly critical to the vision of Semantic Web. But this panel still did not touch the very core of Web evolution, i.e. what the essential driving force of web evolution is and how this force really drives the Web forward.

Very recently at WWW 2008, we finally have a workshop organized by the WSRI that focused solely on the study of Web evolution. Nevertheless is it a big step forward, most of the accepted papers in the workshop still focuses on describing the various phenomena of Web technology evolution rather than digging the fundamental reasons that drive the progress of Web evolution and how these reasons may drive the Web forward in the future.

Formal Study of Web Evolution

To the best of my knowledge, the article "Evolution of World Wide Web, a historical view and analogical study" is the first attempt to explain the essence of Web evolution on the ground of a theoretical study. The first draft of Part 1 was posted at January 12, 2007, and the first draft of Part 2 was posted at April 27, 2007. The Part 3 is still in progress. The Part 1 describes an analogical comparison between the growth of World Wide Web and the growth of humans. The Part 2 makes a scientific abstraction of the analogy discussed in Part 1 and concludes a view of Web evolution by two postulates and seven corollaries. Furthermore, in Part 2 we have also applied the newly abstracted Web-evolution theory to predict the path towards the next-generation Web (or Web 3.0 in someone's mind).

We have taken a great deal of effort to write and revise the articles. But it is simply too broad and sophisticated project to make it perfect in short time. Hence at the same time, I have authored a compact series about Web evolution in ten installments here at Thinking Space (the whole list of the post is attached at the end of this post). This series is more updated than the original article.

Brief Summary of the Web Evolution Theory

If World Wide Web does evolve, we believe that the progress of Web evolution must obey the general law of Transformation of Quantity into Quality, which is a general law of any evolutionary process in the world. In particular to the case of Web evolution, the general law is shown as a spiral advancement that consists of unstopping quantitative accumulation of Web resources and successive qualitative stage transitions. On the Web, whenever the quantity of Web resources reaches a certain level so that the amount becomes too many to be efficiently operated by the Web resource operating mechanism at the meantime, the Web will demand an upgrade of Web resource operating mechanism (a qualitative transition) to ensure the continuity of Web evolution. After the qualitative transition is done, the Web then start a new round of quantitative accumulation of Web resources at a higher level. The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is a typical example of this theory.

Although the general law of Transformation of Quantity into Quality explains the path of Web evolution, it does not explain the reasons beneath the unstopping quantitative accumulation of Web resources. In other words, why does such a unstopping quantitative accumulation of Web resources happen and never stop? The answer to this question is related to the human aspect of World Wide Web. To the end, World Wide Web is a project produced by humans, contributed by humans, and serving humans.

The fundamental power of unstopping human contribution to the Web is laid on a nature of mankind---the desire of being known when alive and still being remembered after death. Human is a social creature. The invention of World Wide Web helps satisfy the deep concern of humanity itself. This fulfillment is the fundamental momentum that drives the resource accumulation on the Web.

This theory of Web evolution is not flawless. Many arguments might be debatable and amendable. The main purpose of this work is to bring the world a fresh new vision of Web evolution. In fact, Web evolution is not just about the Web, it is indeed about all humans and our society.

A View of Web Evolution

1. In the Beginning …
2. Three Evolutionary Elements
3. Two Postulates
4. Web Evolution and Human Growth
5. Evolutionary Stage
6. Qualities of Evolutionary Stages
7. Trigger of Transition
8. Beginning of a Stage Transition
9. Essence of Web Evolution
10. Completion of a Stage Transition

Planet Semantic Focus went to the public

Allow me to do a little bit advertisement. (Very rarely I do so.) Planet Semantic Focus is now open to the public. Planet Semantic Focus is an automated aggregator that delivers the most up-to-time news and discussions primarily from various semantic-web-oriented blogs. It is a nice place to check if you do not have the time or patience to wander through all these sites. Added with this important piece, SemanticFocus grows closer and closer to be a central hub of digested semantic-web information. James Simmons has done terrific work on building up the site. Great work, James!