It’s going to be a pretty long article, so you can skip to the short version/conclusion here.

Streams

The Web is definitely moving towards a stream-like, conversational structure. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, all of these work as streams. More importantly, to emphasize the trend, feed readers and even Gmail are starting to look like streams/conversations. I find myself spending over 50% of my personal time online in a stream environment and, if you consider Gmail a stream-like experience, probably close to 80% of my work time inside streams.

There are two approaches to streams that, if you look at how we function as human beings in real life, are totally complementary.

Imagine meeting a friend outside a coffee shop en route to a meeting. The friend, with the context around her is an atom in a stream of inputs that demands your attention. You start talking to her about something, the conversation then suddenly focuses on something else. Your phone rings and so you focus your attention on the phone call, which is actually just another atom in the stream. Your meeting partner is going to be late. You then switch your attention to your friend and start talking about something completely different.

This is the way we operate in real life when we try to find information or socialize, yet the Web does not reflect that. Until now.

I’d associate the stream of information all around you with the way Twitter works, while the way we dig deeper into a certain subject / interact with a social object is more like FriendFeed works – or ContextVoice / uberVU for that matter.

Whatever the type of stream you experience, soon enough you realize you cannot consume it all, as it was not conceived for that. Navigation becomes more important that it has been so far with pages, because a stream changes continuously. It’s not just about finding some “relevant” information, like you do on Google, because that may not be relevant anymore in a changing stream. I’d argue that it’s not even just about finding “real time” information, like you do on Twitter search, because that only addresses the time axis. It’s a combination of the two that probably yields the best results.

How we think about streams

We started tracking comments from all over the Web around URLs because we felt a conversation does not stay trapped within a single site or domain and so you should not experience the conversation that way. The conversation flows between blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and social networks but it’s essentially the same conversations.

Pages don’t matter anymore, it’s all about being able to tap into the right stream at the right time and filter it as you like.

What ContextVoice does is find related bits of streams (trackbacks, comments, tweets) from the larger stream, sticks them together and creates a new stream that we keep track of. We think it’s one way of navigating the larger Stream, by sticking together related pieces that are part of the same conversation.

As streams will be the fabric of the Web, being able to tap into streams to extract valuable information is going to be key. Navigating and participating in streams will be part of most web apps and will be used by both people and businesses. Everybody will be using this technology, just like e-mail and RSS. It’s already happening, with buzztracking tools and customer service on Twitter.

We can easily imagine applications tapping into streams to extract events, financial and health information, interests, relationships and a lot of other types of data, processing it and then pushing back to the Stream, to be consumed. This is where ContextVoice comes in providing applications with easily accessible ways of tapping the Stream.

Taking this to the next level, we believe search is probably going to still be the preferred way of finding information in the Stream. But I think of search not as it is today, but mostly as a combination of Tracking and Discovery. You’ll express what you want to know about, not necessarily now, but perpetually, and search system should be smart enough to pick up the appropriate pieces of the Stream, apply filters and deliver the right data to you, as a stream.

This is the approach we’re taking with uberVU. uberVU will be a search and analytics product, where you’ll be able to both search for conversations around URLs and search for keywords. The results returned will be whole conversations, not just posts or tweets containing the keyword. And, of course, you’ll be able to experience searching for a keyword as a stream of conversations updated in close to realtime.

We think this is an important distinction which ties into the role Context will play in the new Web.

The Role of Context

The Stream is made up of atomic pieces that constantly flow, with not much context to go by. Think of your Twitter stream – continuous updates on different subjects, shared links – each update does not have much context except the author and the time of posting.

People’s need for context became evident even on Twitter. That’s why we have @, RT or #. These symbols are trying to bring in a piece of context and encapsulate it in the atomic bit of information. So context is needed if we are to make sense of what information in the Stream means and where our attention should lie.

A more subtle implication of this fact is that context should be able to be incapsulated in the information itself and easily travel with the information wherever it goes. Of course, context changes over time and a piece of information can be looked at from within different contexts.

This is exactly why we built ContextVoice as a different product than uberVU.

Firstly, ContextVoice gets CONTEXT around stories from all over the Web. Instead of getting simple bits of information with no context around them, we get comments from all over the Web that are about the same story. This makes for some interesting information. You can see actual comments but also how they’re related to each other (RT, threads, comments to trackbacks), how they happened on the timeline, how fast the conversation has accelerated and decelerated, etc.

Secondly, as I said before, CONTEXT should be able to travel with the data. This can prove really tricky, as some conversations are made up of over 10,000 bits of information. In order to solve this problem, ContextVoice can return all the CONTEXT around a story in a single API call. We can’t encapsulate it in the data, as it’s not practical, but we have set it free and easily accessible.

Thirdly, we are not the only ones that will need this data. A lot of companies will use it, as we move more and more towards a more streamy Web. What we’re doing with uberVU is a single use case in a sea of possibilities.

Context can be used for many things. More context is usually better, but after a certain limit, I think context will only be useful in realtime search. People won’t be able to process it, but we’ll need it if we want to get relevant search results in realtime. As uberVU will mostly be a search product, we’re trying to get as much context around stories as we can, there no such thing as too much.

In Short

The Web is turning into a realtime Stream. We won’t be able to digest it all, so navigation will be increasingly important. One way to navigate the Stream will be through Search, but smart realtime search needs a lot of Context around the atomic bits of information if we are to find the truly relevant information we need from this everflowing, noisy Stream.

We built ContextVoice in order to get Context around stories from all over the Web. We get comments, mentions, reactions, tweets and other things, some of them in close to real time. ContextVoice is an API because of two reasons:

1. Context should be able to travel with the data. As we can’t encapsulate this much context within the data itself, providing it as an API call seems to be the easiest way.

2. As the Stream becomes the very fabric of the Web, being able to tap it will probably become like RSS or e-mail. Everyone will need this technology as part of their apps or businesses.

uberVU, the product that uses ContextVoice will try to tackle one of the problems of navigating this Stream – what you’d call Search and I’d call Track/Discovery. Finding fully contextual conversations (streams) to participate in, not just atomic bits that contain keywords.

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It’s been a long article, but if you’ve come this far, I encourage you to hang in there for a couple more seconds and share your thoughts.

Everybody’s talking about the recession. What needs to be done to survive, who will get killed, how to fire personnel in style and how to focus.

I’ve also been talking to some people who are smarter than me about this during the previous week. There’s been recurrent themes such as:

* FOCUS

* GET TO BREAK EVEN QUICKLY

* GET AS MUCH MONEY FROM INVESTORS AS YOU CAN

* CUT COSTS

Apart from these ones, there’s been a few that I find very interesting and that are interrelated.

The first one is this:

FOLLOW THE MONEY, NOT THE CROWD
This is interesting because most people tend to cut costs everywhere and anywhere. People also tend to try to do what’s popular because they think that’s going to get them through the recession.

What I make of this advice is this: FIND OUT WHAT PART OF YOUR SERVICE PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR AND DO THAT. DON’T ASSUME THAT IF SOMETHING IS POPULAR, PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR IT (see Facebook). EXPERIMENT QUICKLY AND STICK TO WHAT STICKS.

Also, DON’T CUT COSTS THAT ARE REVENUE GENERATING. Cut the company Christmas Party maybe, don’t cut the ads or the sales person that’s actually making you money. Cost-cutting in good, but don’t cut what’s popular to cut. Cut what does not help you survive.

The second one is:

MEDIOCRITY DOES NOT SURVIVE RECESSIONS
This is kind of in your face, but it’s probably the most important piece of advice. If you’re plain excellent, you’ll thrive no matter what. So indeed FOCUS, but focus on what you think you can be the best at and forget the rest.

So out of all the discussions I’ve been following recently about the recession, I’ve taken these two pieces of advice to heart and that’s what I think I’ll act on. The rest is common sense.

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These are sensible questions. To get a better grasp of the need we felt when we started to build uberVU, here’s a quick case study of how a company might use uberVU:

ACME is a hypothetical enterprise that is a leader in the sports equipment market. ACME is really interested in the running community. A lot of their products are made for this market, so they are looking for ways to connect with this community a lot more.

ACME also follows the blog of the Track Running Club. They joined the conversation and they find out that the club wants to organize a track running day in their small town, but they lack the money for that. ACME gives away one pair of top running shoes to whoever donates 50$ to the Track Running Club. This way they help the club, they make people try their products and get acknowledged as a company that is truly passionate about running and runners.

What was supposed to be a short presentation turned into a live demo of uberVU. We demoed the app for 5 minutes and then we had a short discussion around the product. We were very happy about that, as people seemed pretty interested and hit us with some tough questions.

DataPortability issues, traffic stealing, or keeping context around a conversation are themes that reappear again and again during our presentations and we’re happy that uberVU is a conversation starter about these important issues.

What’s best about this is the fact that people are starting to get why what we’re doing is important and how it’s related to the way conversations will take place online in the near future.

All in all, GeekMeet was a great event for us and we’re looking forward to going there again.

One of the enduring and real elements of the web 2.0 discussion is the new way in which online businesses are reaching their audiences. This has spawned some buzzwords, such as ‘open APIs’ and ‘widgets’, and has added a layer of complexity into building an online business. Those who succeed in harnessing these techniques command a competitive advantage. As an investor I am always looking for teams which react fast to changing market dynamics – effectively utilising the distributed web is one such test of reaction speeds. But what does this all mean?

In the first iteration of the web, it was enough to publish your web site and try to drive people to it, to use your service and buy your goods. Perhaps you closed a few deals to get other sites to carry a version of your service and you certainly spent some money on advertising. All of these channels to get people to your site cost money – unless you stumbled upon the ingredients of word-of-mouth marketing which a few notable sites (e.g. Google) did.

In the past few years, however, several high-profile examples of new ways to get your user in front of your product have emerged, including open APIs and widgets. APIs are application programming interfaces that allow people to interact with your product/service/data/technology.

Opening up part of it to people outside of your organisation may sound like a recipe for losing control. However, when done successfully it can be very powerful. The best example of where this works well is Google Maps. Littered across the web now are Google Maps embedded in other web sites. The site owner has not made a deal with Google but has just utilised the open API it provides. In return, Google receives free marketing for its product on thousands of web sites (and will most likely start embedding adverts into the maps at some point and make money from this free distribution).

Widgetising your product involves allowing the mainstream internet user to embed your product into their personal page (blog, MySpace page, etc). YouTube is a great example – on every page is an ‘embed’ code which users can insert into their pages. YouTube gained huge traction early on via users viewing videos on MySpace pages which contained YouTube embeds. Several other large businesses have been built in this way, where the user interacts with their product on a blog or MySpace page.

This new form of distribution is very cheap and can be incredibly powerful. The downside is the inevitable loss of control and also dependence on the policies of the likes of MySpace which have been known to ban certain embeds. Using these channels effectively will become a core competence of many online businesses, especially as audiences fragment to more niche locations in the ever expanding world wide web. The companies that exploit this most effectively will be successful and we at 3i look forward to talking with them in the future.

The article was published in MicroScope magazine.

That’s why you probably post videos to YouTube, then embed them on your site. You don’t post them on your site or host them there. The simple fact that your videos are on YouTube gives you access to a great publishing platform and to a great potential audience. Here’s the problem we have with this approach.Just because the content is now distributed on a variety of sites, platforms, widgets and so on, that means your attention in handling conversations also has to be distributed.

You just got back from a cool trip and you want to blog about it. You upload the pics to Picasa or Flickr, Post some cool trip videos to YouTube.
Then you embed some of them in a blog post. Now everybody knows about the crazy fun you had on the trip. But if you want to see people’s reactions to your post, to your pics and videos, you have to visit Flickr and YouTube over and over again. Although the pictures, the videos and the blog post are connected by one main meaningful theme, you can’t see them all in one place. And you can’t see the way they are related.

This means that, just to keep track of the conversations you start, your attention is all over the place. That’s not very fun, you waste a lot of time and it’s hard to keep track with what’s being said. We believe that, since you are the creator of your content, you should be able to manage it properly. It’s your digital life, and in a sense, you’re now spending as much time managing it as you spend living it. As more and more ways to create, publish and remix appear, you’ll need a good way to manage all you create more and more.

Welcome to the future, where bits and pieces of your digital self are scattered all over the place. Don’t let them get lost, they are parts of you.