Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses on ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
I was recently contacted by a computer scientist, Sergey Bulanov, who has been working quietly for 20 years on a new approach to artificial intelligence. It’s a pretty interesting and novel approach, and I would like to see what others think about it. From what I understand, the essence of Sergey’s approach is a new [...]
Today I had an interesting phone call with an alumnus of my alma mater, Oberlin College. He called me for an informational interview, asking for some career advice. It was a good conversation. At one point, on a tangent, he asked me why I went to Oberlin? It’s a funny story actually. In fact, I [...]
Continuing with the theme I’ve been writing about lately, focused on the growth of the next phase of the Web, what I call “The Stream,” I’ve started to analyze the messages I get on a typical day. First of all, through all the different channels I use, I now receive approximately 13,000 messages a day. [...]
This is Part III of a series of articles on the new era of the Stream, a new phase of the Web. In Part I, The Message is the Medium, I explored the shift in focus on the Web from documents to messages. In Part II, Drowning in the Stream, we dove deep into some of [...]
This is Part II of a three-part series of articles on how the Stream is changing the Web. In Part I of this series, The Message is the Medium, I wrote about some of the shifts that are taking place as the center of online attention shifts from documents to messages. Here in Part II, [...]
Shift Happens A major shift has taken place on the Web. Web pages and Web search are no longer the center of online activity and attention. Instead, the new center of attention is messaging and streams. We have moved from the era of the Web to the era of the Stream. This changes everything. Back [...]
In the previous article in this series, Is The Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges I wrote about some new evidence that appears to suggest that the universe may be like a computer, or least that it contains computer codes of a sort. But while this evidence is fascinating, I don’t believe that ultimately the [...]
I haven’t posted in a while, but this is blog-worthy material. I’ve recently become familiar with the thinking of University of Maryland physicist, James Gates Jr. Dr. Gates is working on a branch of physics called supersymmetry. In the process of his work he’s discovered the presence of what appear to resemble a form of [...]
Bottlenose Beta 2.0 launched today, and it’s pretty innovative. Three good articles came out covering it: ReadWriteWeb – Bottlenose is a 6th Sense for the Social Web SemanticWeb.com – Bottlenose Beta Two Features New Layout, Visuals TechCrunch – Bottlenose 2.0: Taming the “Share-pocalypse” Also Robert Scoble blogged about it on Google+ here. Bottlenose also blogged [...]
I’m really pleased to announce that a startup I helped co-found, Live Matrix, has been acquired by OVGuide, a leading video portal. TechCrunch covered the deal here. The new combined company is a unique powerhouse in the online video space – covering the entire life cycle of online videos from when they are upcoming, to [...]
Today I’m happy to announce the launch of StreamGlider, a new tablet app (initially on iPad) that provides the first live streaming dashboard for keeping up with your interests. TechCrunch just broke the story. The inspiration for StreamGlider was a product that launched in the early 1990′s called Pointcast. Pointcast streamed news, entertainment, ads and [...]
After my former project, Twine.com, was sold, I began to turn my attention to the Next Big Challenge: How to make sense of the growing real-time Web, or what many call, “the Stream.” I could see the writing on the wall, and it was less than 140 characters: Social media’s own success was going to [...]
Today, after almost two years of work in stealth, I am proud to announce the launch of Bottlenose. While I have co-founded and serve on the boards of several other ventures (The Daily Dot, Live Matrix, StreamGlider, and others), Bottlenose is different from all my other projects in that I am also in a full-time [...]
Several years ago my friend Gil Elbaz (CEO of Factual; forefather of Google AdWords) approached me with an ambitious vision – he wanted to create an open not-for-profit crawl of the Web to ensure that everyone would have equal access to a Web-scale search index to build on and experiment with. Search giants like Google [...]
Joshua Schachter, the creator of Delicious, has launched his newest creation, Jig. At first glance the site seems a bit like Twitter, but it has a different focus. Instead of posting about what you are doing, you post about what you need. Then other people reply with suggestions, ideas, answers, help, or presumably commercial products [...]
The team at Icosystem invited me to try out their new Infomous cloud widget. You can see it on the top of the right column of this blog. It visualizes the concept graph in my blog posts. It has some cool features – click on any topic and explore the related posts. If you sign [...]
Today I’m pleased to announce that, The Daily Dot, our newest “venture production,” has launched into public beta. The Daily Dot is the first of its kind – it’s the Web’s newspaper — the first community newspaper about the Web. We cover the Web like a town paper covers its community. Here’s a video overview [...]
I was interviewed in a number of video segments for a project called The Future of Facebook, part of the Open Foresight initiative by Venessa Miemis and Alvis Brigis. One of the videos was just on CNN. You can see my other segments on my Videos page.
The social media landscape is changing quickly, but this change won’t be immediate, or for that matter, efficient. And that’s going to be a big problem for all of us. I believe that Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn are fundamentally different, and thus, should not be in competition. However, I’m not sure the companies themselves [...]
It may look like Google+ is competing with Facebook and Twitter, but I don’t think that is what will happen in the end. I think Google+ is a very different kind of service and it’s not clear that it can or will, or should, replace these other services. In a series of articles here on [...]
Everyone, including possibly even the Google+ team, is currently thinking that Google+ is a Twitter and Facebook competitor. But I think in fact, Google+ is for something entirely different. Google+ is not really for socializing; it’s for sharing knowledge. That’s what makes it different from other social networks. It supports more flexible access permissions on [...]
In previous articles, I’ve written about how Google+ can build a developer ecosystem on Chrome that is different from Twitter’s ecosystem, and how Twitter must change to survive against that. It’s clear that Google+ and Twitter are very different animals. Now what about Facebook? Should Facebook be worried about Google+? Are Facebook and Google+ really [...]
As a result of the emergence of Google+, Twitter could soon find itself in a tough spot. A large chunk of their core developer base might migrate to Google+ because there is simply more opportunity there. Why? Well for starters, it’s really easy to crank out Chrome extensions and you can market and sell them [...]
Google+ has seen some good initial uptake from early-adopters in its first few weeks. But how will it leverage developers and partners? In order to really build value around Google+, of course Google will integrate it with their other products, including Search, Gmail, and more. That will get it in front of a lot of [...]
I was recently interviewed by Stephen Ibaraki and Alex Lin (CEO of ChinaValue) in what turned out to be the most interesting, far-reaching, and multi-disciplinary (and long) interview I’ve ever given. I was very pleased with the depth of their questions and the topics we covered. You can listen to the MP3 version here, or [...]
TechCrunch kindly ran my most recent article today — the full version is available here. Here is an excerpt: I’ve been puzzling over Twitter’s recent tactical moves around their API, Ubermedia and Tweetdeck, for a few months now, and it just doesn’t add up. In fact I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in [...]