I read a few blog posts lately about where the Web is going and they struck a cord. They managed to articulate more clearly some of the things that we felt intuitively when we started building ContextVoice / uberVU and were not able to clearly express.

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.

Conversations are becoming the fabric of the social web. Millions of people are commenting everywhere about everything. With the rise of services like Twitter, this is happening faster and faster, in close to real time.

Tapping into these conversations and communities, although difficult technically, is not something new. There are dozens of companies out there offering buzztracking services for marketing, PR and advertising professionals based on these online conversations.

However, as social media has become mainstream and social business software has become more widespread, some interesting changes have started to happen.

1. First of all, social media tracking is becoming a commodity. There are a lot of free tools out there that are doing a good job at tracking all of this. Also, a lot of people are starting to use these tools, even outside of professional circles. People track their names, their friends, their favorite bands or companies on Twitter and on blogs. They’ve started to take social media for granted.
2. Secondly, as social business software proliferates, more people at lower levels of the organization are starting to make the use of social media central to their work. They’re talking to people inside and outside of the organization and need tools to track and manage all those conversations.
3. Thirdly, as Fred Wilson states, a new layer of social media is emerging. This new layer works on top of existing platforms (social networks, blog comments, Twitter) to provide valuable data, insights and analytics. As this new layer takes shape, the underlying data it’s based on should become easier to track in real time, making data gathering a commodity.

Right now every company that wants to tap into social media conversations either to create a new product or to use that data internally has to develop crawling software and hardware infrastructure that’s complicated to build and very costly to run. Crawling is not their core business, yet they have to do it. This is, of course, highly inefficient, like having every company building and providing its own internet connection or ERP software.

This is where ContextVoice comes in. We feel that social media conversations will become as widespread as e-mail, even inside businesses. Using social media daily in your work and personal life will take an even more central role. With thousands of conversations happening this second, crawling, analyzing, filtering and making sense of the data will not be easy, but it will be essential.

The ContextVoice API delivers close to real time conversations as a service, because crawling and filtering are just a necessary evil if they’re not the core business. We think social media conversations are a commodity that companies and individuals should be able to tap into cheaply and effectively and that’s our purpose.

Next week will be full of events where you can meet some of the people from uberVU. The list:

1. SOMESSO – London – 15 May
   This conference focuses on how businesses can build and leverage communities using social media tools. It features insight talks from innovators such as Stowe Boyd, Marilyn Pratt and Jason Falls and case studies on global brands such as IBM, GoViral, and Jim Beam, along with interactive sessions, strategy workshops and digital consultancy clinics. Vladimir will have a 15 minutes presentation about social media conversation tracking and uberVU new release.
2. Open Agile – Bucharest – 23 May
   Mircea and Mihnea, two superstars developers, will talk about how we do agile development and SCRUM at uberVU and why is this important. Agile & OpenAgile is the first big event in Romania about managing software development with Agile methods, about combining techniques, technologies and attitudes to create value both for customers and companies creating software.
3. Seedcamp – Ljubljana – 13-14-15 May
   Being a Seedcamp winner from Eastern Europe, we felt an obligation to participate at Seedcamp in Ljubljana. Dragos, will be there to help the presenting team in any way he can. He will also have a presentation at OpenCoffee and Barcamp.

Looking fwd to meet you guys next week. Come and say Hi.

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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Since Twitter is the new Thing, here’s some startup advice in just 140 chars. Very interesting.

I came across John Quelch’s article named “How to Market in a Recession” this morning. He tries to dispense some marketing tactics that we, as companies, can use to survive this recession. There are some good points in the article, but what drew my attention was the following paragraph:

2. Focus on family values. When economic hard times loom, we tend to retreat to our village. Look for cozy hearth-and-home family scenes in advertising to replace images of extreme sports, adventure and rugged individualism. Zany humor and appeals on the basis of fear are out. Greeting card sales, telephone use and discretionary spending on home furnishings and home entertainment will hold up well, as uncertainty prompts us to stay at home but also stay connected with family and friends.

This is probably the most insulting thing I’ve heard all year. I think this is actually one of the main reasons we got to where we are today. We focused on creating this artificial persona called “the brand” and shoved it down people’s throats. And we did it with the utmost lack of honesty.

It makes sense that our values are “adventure and rugged individualism” today and “cozy hearth-and-home family” tomorrow. We drew people into a trap to make them buy any way we could. It did not matter that it was not sustainable. That the whole process was broken. And that’s how we got to where we are today.

But that’s not the issue. The issue is: do we treat the illness we have today with the same poison that we uses to start that illness in the first place? Or do we do something radically different? My bet is on the latter.

The time for fake promises and foced associations might well be over. It is now time to simply and honestly engage with the people that we insulted by calling them “consumers“. It’s time to just have sincere conversations, to get together with them and try to fix whatever is broken. And it’s time to listen and we might just be amazed at what they have to say. Because in the end, they’re just people who want to be respected and who want to talk to real people that really listen and care.

After all, “Your call is important to us“.

The Semantic Web in general and Semantic Web Services in particular seem to be very elusive concepts. It’s not difficult to understand what the semantic web will do, but if you don’t have an AI background, it’s difficult to know where to start when trying to build a semantic web app/service.

We thought we’d make things easier on programmers that wanted to know more about the semantic web, so we set up a 3 day crash course. The course took place during the last 3 days (7-8-9 July) at the Computer Science Faculty in Bucharest. It was a very interesting experience.

1. During the first day of the course, Stefan Trausan and Vlad Posea from the Computer Science Faculty showed introduced us to the basic concepts of the semantic web. We then got to build an ontology from scratch and build a semtic web crawler that would look for and index some semantic mark-up data. Very interesting stuff.
2. During the second day, it was our turn to take the lead and introduce people to RESTful semantic web services. We talked about web service architecture, authentication and DataPortability. Later on we got to play with a handful of API and we implemented a distributed conversation, much like what uberVU will do starting with September ‘08.
3. Our friend George Aprozeanu from Adobe wrapped up the course during the third day. He showed us some very cool programming techniques for creating MVC apps without any framework whatsoever. Very elegant and subtle.

The course was a success in our opinion, in that attendees left with some basic skills and with a sense of the possibilities of the Semantic Web. Because of this, we plan to make this course permanent at the Computer Science Faculty. We feel that the Semantic Web and new Web technologies in general don’t get the attention they deserve from the academic world in Romania. This is sad, as the Web is definately where the future is.

More info on this course as we make progress towards setting it up permanently.

I have so called “friends” on many so called social sites. And each time I try to have conversations with my friends, those sites tend to gently pat me on my shoulder and remind me that the medium is the message.

I have to conform to the 140 characters that have been kindly offered to me by Twitter. I want to post a message to the thread in Facebook Groups, but I can only reply to a single person’s statement. Conversations on the web seem to be trickier than one would expect.

But what are conversations really about? What are you actually doing when having a conversation with someone face to face at your favorite restaurant? You’re talking about SOMETHING with SOMEONE. So what should actually matter to you on the Web is THE SUBJECT, THE PEOPLE and THE CONTEXT. NOT the platform.

The technology doesn’t really matter. Moreover, the technology should be transparent in the conversational Web. All we should see are PEOPLE we want to talk to, and THINGS we want to talk about, connected by a CONTEXT that shows us how the conversation is unfolding.

Some call this the distributed web, but it’s really not. It’s a lot more than that. And I’ll tell you what it’s not also. It’s not FriendFeed and it’s not LifeStreaming. It’s not about seeing your friends’ tweets and pokes in one place.

The interesting Conversational Web that I’m seeing only shows you what matters, the content and the people. And it lets you interact with both without caring, or even knowing where they come from. You may be talking about golf with a friend and about photography with another. The golf friend might be using a regular forum, or even a newsgroup to contribute to the conversation. The photography friend might be using both a blog, a photo sharing site and an IM service to share his opinions and examples. And you wouldn’t know or care about that. You’d see it all the same. All you would care about would be that you’re having a meaningful conversation in a very rich way.

There are a lot of challenges to using this approach. There’s the authentication and security, that OpenID might take care of. There’s the problem of finding a way of showing meaningful information about someone so you know who you’re talking to in that context. If you’re talking about photography lighting techniques, you might find interesting to know that the person you’re talking to is a professional photographer. But you might not care about that if you’re talking about parenting.

There’s also the problem of making all these services work together so that you can actually interconnect them. And there’s always the problem of providing CONTEXT. There are millions of interesting conversations about photography around the Web. How you find out about them, organize them, get them in front of the user and keep track of the participation across platforms is very, very tricky.

I honestly think it can be done and it must be done. The way the Web is going today, I see a flood of noise grouped by way of some social order (Graph, if you may). People keep to their current communities, limiting themselves to the same group of people that say the same uninteresting things. Some friend everybody, flooding themselves with information that they never intend to process and in the end having lots of shallow interactions.

The Conversational Web can be a great thing for us. But it needs a lot more tweaking if we are to be able to have lots of meaningful conversations, meet lots of new great people that we deeply connect with, all without wasting all our time in the process.

Think about it, please.