DALMATIAN : DOG ::

(A) oriole : bird

(B) horse : pony

(C) shark : great white

(D) ant : insect

(E) stock : savings

It seems with growing frequency, I’m pulled into conversations regarding Twitter with many who are just now learning about it.  Great Time article on Twitter by the way.  Yes, I get the often “I just don’t get Twitter.”  I used to think that too when I first heard about the service.  I quickly no longer thought that.  But, recently, I get “Why use Twitter when you can just update your status on Facebook?”  And this throws me right back into the 90′s:  “Do you use the internet?” “Oh yes, I use AOL all the time.”  So back to my SAT analogy:

web : AOL :: Twitter status : Facebook status

Remember the walled garden of AOL, how many users would think that was the web, never venturing out into the wild world of the wide web.  Times change but I see history repeating itself.  The struggle and growing awareness of open and closed systems.  There is a tremendous amount of value being generated off the openness of Twitter than is available within Facebook, where your status network can only be as big who you are willing to have in your personal friends’ list.  The same goes for status in LinkedIn and who you are willing to have in your professional connections’ list.  The situation is certainly more complex than AOL of the 90s but strikingly similar.

These infrequent occassions of being sans connection without a mobile device pumping the zeros and ones out in the ether does give you pause to take stock of life (being on a ranch in the middle of Argentina can do it too).  Yes, the connections of Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook are valuable, are changing the personal and business communication landscape and will continue to do so.   We are building life-long connections and friendships through the medium all the time.  That part I did miss when away.

But remember, there are so many other things just as important.  Like the Giants making a huge splash in free agency with fantastic defensive signings of LB Michael Boley, DT Rocky Bernard and DT/DE Chris Canty!  Okay, just kidding. (sort of)  Friends, family, enjoying a nice day outside, going to the gym and going on vacation when you can.  These are just as important.  If you don’t take the time to unplug, even for a bit, I highly recommend it.

So, anyway, now that I’m back and cycling up again, I feel I’m beginning to catch up on my feeds reading and wanted to drop a little note out here.  Flew threw countless number of feeds and postings today.  The one that struck a cord, the latest Kindle.  The Kindle device is vastly improved but that is not what is important.  The ecosystem shift is important, the Kindle iPhone app and deployment to other mobile phones is important.  To me, it has a similar footprint to the movement of apps on the iPhone itself and what that is doing in the mobile space.

Not going to go into it more here but it is clear that there is a movement taking place that could very well be another major shift in the digital media landscape and in “written” content consumption overall.  Media companies must pay attention.  Steve Rubel has a great post from a couple of days ago discussing this very topic.  If you read only one today, I would recommend that be it.  (Well, that would mean you read two today because you had to read this one just to get to that one.

Below is a great video about why we have a major data portability problem on our hands and why data portability is needed. I find myself not wanting to investigate or join some of the last new ventures coming out simply because the thought of entering another userid/password, profile and clicking to follow another set of people (who are the same people) makes my blood boil. The latest example is BackType, great concept, aggregating all of your comments everywhere, even aggregating the aggregating blog comments systems out there like Disqus.  So I went halfway, I sign-up and claimed my profile.  But I am not going to go and follow Scoble, Fred Wilson and Brad Feld yet again.  Twitter, Tumblr, Dopplr, Facebook, Disqus or Intense Debate, etc, etc, etc…  No way.

There are ventures trying to clean this up like openID but it is not happening fast enough. Or I should say it isn’t happening anywhere near as fast as new services are hitting the web. I don’t have any doubt that we are collectively going to get there. The question is when. This can not be one of those topics like the FCC opening the wireless spectrum, the promise of mobility or the nirvana of the digital home that will and does go on for years. It has to happen fast. Without it, if I’m getting frustrated with it, then the services we all sing praises about are never going to cross the chasm into the mainstream.

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut on Vimeo.

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Anyway, the keynote by Fred Wilson was an interesting one. If you didn’t work the web during the first online boom, it is a great history lesson. If you did, particularly in a NYC-based company, it is a great stroll down memory lane. The late 90′s was a phenomenal time for the web in NYC with a lot of great lessons, both good and bad. Fred discusses these and the companies that really built the web presence in NY.

I was surprised to hear Fred’s funding analysis regarding the number of early stage investments in NYC start-ups as compared to Silicon Valley. I would never have guessed the numbers were converging at such a rate since the 90s as it is. In fact, I would have guessed that the gap has widened, perhaps it is only the coverage of the start-ups that has widened and remained very Valley-heavy.

Final note, also couldn’t agree more that the term Silicon Alley needs to find its end. Working in the Alley in the late 90′s, it was a cool moniker at first but for some reason always struck me as positioning NYC as “second follow” rather than innovative leader. There is some great innovation coming out of NY, particularly in media and advertising. There is no reason that NYC needs to be tied to the Valley by name, in fact there is no chip developing that I know of happening in NYC so does the name even make sense?

Anyway, great video, recommend a view.

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I cannot add anything to the second Tissue, others have blogged about the technology and architectural framework issues that Twitter is experiencing. Ironically, Tim O’Reilly messaged his interest in blog post detailing some hypothesis about Twitter’s issues via a tweet itself. I definitely recommend reading it. Anyway, technology is one major Tissue, let’s leave it at that.

Secondly, micro-blogging has taken hold. This is also a major Tissue. Quite simply, there are so many things in the world you can convey in 140 characters (the character limit that Twitter allows in a single message). Anything you can think of, even notifying others of earthquakes, can fly in seconds over Twitter.  Because of this dynamic, many are shooting their thoughts over Twitter instead of blogging.  I find myself tweeting much more than blogging because I find I can convey much of the thought in two sentences so why ‘go on’ about it.  So we are witnessing a change in human behavior or at least the behavior of early technology adopters, we still must admit most of the world doesn’t blog or tweet.

Anyway, one could argue this dynamic is basically causing Twitter to slowly but surely handle all of the messaging load from every blogging platform out there, a major Tissue. In fact, now even when people blog, they shoot a note out via Twitter that their blog post is posted.  When they use FriendFeed, Tweets are fired out.  When people reply, Tweets are fired out. So Twitter’s success, adoption and use cases is what is causing all of the Tissues to begin with and could lead to Twitter’s downfall, the ultimate irony.

It is this irony that I find the most fascinating of all.  I’m personally rooting for Twitter.

BTW, I could have used Twitter to convey much of this via Twitter instead of blogging. In fact, I did to make a point.  And don’t forget to find my tweet notifying you all that I published this blog post .

My view before getting to the solution, we must get back to purpose of blogging or participating in social media in any way. Is it to become a destination yourself? Or is it, as Gary Vaynerchuk likes to say, to “execute on being you” and building your personal legacy. I’ve always thought of it in terms of the latter, to participate and being part of the conversation, but never the ultimate destination. We must put ourselves in the role of the consumer, centralizing them to go hundreds of locations to consume content. This is why RSS is so popular to distribute the content and why aggregation is so dominant to bring it back together for them.

Which brings me to my next point? Loic stressed centralization as the solution but one of his primary reasons is because the conversation is happening in all facets of his social media life and he cannot keep track of it. My hypothesis to solving this is not that each blogger become a content destination at their blog but rather a solution must developed to solve that problem. Perhaps FriendFeed and Disqus are two early solutions attacking this problem; the space certainly needs to evolve further. Brad Feld discusses the notification solution proposed by Josh Kopelman which I found very provactive.

I tent to agree where this discussion is heading. I want to be social media involved in a number of places, not have everyone come one place to get it. However, I DO want to manage it all in one place. I would love a “notification dashboard” that is perhaps built upon web services against all the APIs available. I’m imagining a social media Bloomberg of sorts but fully interactive. Here are some of the things such a dashboard could do for me:

• Tell me when I being replied to in any venue?
• Provide me an aggregated bio or links to information on who is “friending” me.
• Notify me when a friend or someone I often have discussions is actively taking part in a conversation, where and in context
• Let me reply back to conversation directly from my dashboard but in context like Disqus
• Use attention data to provide me a priority on what I should look at first versus the less important
• Use semantic techniques to provide me with relevant content and similar conversations
• Use sentiment on the conversations so I have knowledge about where there is agreement or disagreement in the conversations
• A method to “educate” or send things to my dashboard when I stumble upon something interesting so I can have things waiting in a queue for me

Anyone interested in building this, let me know. Should be simple. Just a merging of all of the latest technology trends into one central application. But let me manage centrally but participate everywhere.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg2MukcqbdE

So, Gary is spot on. Everything can captured and those that elect to participate are even more visible obviously. Everyone can be the media. So the question is what is good, what is bad? Often times, the definition is unequivocal. I am not thinking about those scenarios, I’m more concerned about the “gray” area. Back to Jeremiah’s twitter, what is professional and what is unprofessional? Same thing, more concerned with the “gray” area. Twitter is a service to express “what are you doing?” It is not a feature of LinkedIn where you express “what are you doing professionally today?”

So how are blogs, videos, tweets that are more personal perceived? Going out for drinks with co-workers ON A TUESDAY in the middle of the week! Gray? Bad? Unprofessional? If you blog or twitter a couple of years ago that you never wanted to work in a certain industry but fate has brought you exactly there, is all hope lost? They will know. Yes, I swing the pendulum to the extreme to make the point. But it will be very interesting to see where the meme heads.

It used to be that your resume was your personal brand. Just the other day, I was having a conversation with a co-worker about why people still insist on placing “less-than-professional” home email addresses on their resume. It is so avoidable but it is still done. And this is now a such a small set of bytes on one piece of digital paper and is now the least of concerns, a small drop in the ocean of information that could be more readily available with a small amount of investigation.

So in closing, of course, do not be “bad”, do not be “unprofessional”. There are a lot of things that are clear in the views of most. But with all things, people do not define things or form opinions the same way. So now, more than ever, the divide that is closed through technology is going to play an even greater role.

Anyway, over the past few days, I’ve been taking a look at Seesmic more closely, and using the new direct messaging capability which I believe was an absolute must (do not have much interest in contributing out in the public timeline like I do with Twitter). I must say that it is great to see Loic’s team innovating right into the customer feedback.

But there are a couple key issues that Seesmic must get out in front of before they turn into seismic ones. Let’s face it, as cool as video emailing is, using it is flying in the face of years of email com. I’m not sure what the active user number is but I would be shocked if it was very high. There are a couple of reasons for it in my opinion:

- Where is the viral network effect for it? The most successful of start-ups have a key viral play as part of their strategy. If Seesmic has one, it is alluding me. I need a way to invite folks in my network into the conversation.

- As everyone jumps from network play to network play, none of my connections are out of Seesmic. I do not know why this is but it is the case. So unless I want to talk to strangers in the public timeline (which is great way to meet others), it has low utility for me personally.

- Tell me when I have a message waiting in my inbox. This is an absolute must-have feature. Someone direct messaged and I do not get notified in my inbox that I have a message waiting ala Facebook and I cannot subscribe to an inbox RSS feed. Big issue.

- Facilitate growth. Let me direct message a non-member and that will facilitate usage, memberships and traffic. If I direct message someone and they are notified, in most cases, they are going to click through and register to see the message. And some of them will stay continue to video message, participate and invite other friends to partake.

Just some thoughts and perhaps some of these are addressed, and I’m missing them. And perhaps Seesmic is trying to control growth to get their infrastructure footing. But until the above is clearly available, I don’t see the high-flyer tool it has the promise to be.

NOTE (10 p.m. EST): Just made online contact with Cathy from Seesmic. She was extremely responsive both on Seesmic and then tried to come here to comment as well. Just made some comment system changes so hopefully she’ll come back and do so. Looking forward to it! Thanks Cathy and great meeting you.

The emergence of the Semantic Web could prove a major disruption and potentially category killer to many of the web 2.0-like, innovative start-ups that have emerged building a bridge for us to the promise of the semantic web that many believe will never arrive. New players that enable data extraction, tight data integrations and shortcut mash-up platforms could potentially all go straight to the dead pool. Think players like Dapper, Fetch, Connotate, JackBe, Kapow and others.

Now some believe the Semantic Web will never happen, that publishers will never find a standard, embrace it and publish in formats where machines based integration can take place. I am beginning to question this view simply because in my view, the pace of work in the semantic arena seems to increasing each day with new pushes like Sparql, RDF and XBRL. In other cases, the semantic web acting as a disruption will be dismissed. And in others, some of the new players in the space will make the case that the existence of a true semantic web will make them stronger and more valuable players in the ecosystem. Any any of these could be correct.

But right now, my sense is if the semantic web takes off, people will begin to publish out their data and content sets in standard formats. And with that, the need for a number of intermediary players that scrape and extract content and then provide the platform layer to manipulate the information will no longer be there. Machines will be deployed to process information from a variety for a variety of data sources depending on their goals. The data will be there to use, manipulate, combine, mash and collate for new applications. This will already see emerging today, we are simply short on data availability but the time will come, it has to.

We used to think that XML would never happen, people liked their hand-coded HTML. Now we have RSS and Atom because people see the value in distributing their information for consumption. And how many players are there in the true RSS intermediary players are there now? Only a few. Could this space follow a similar path? Time will tell but I’m leaning in that direction.