For the past year plus, there’s been a ton of buzz in the popular tech press about “social networking” platforms, applications, and how “the web is becoming an increasingly connected place.” Much of this was led by increasing interest in social networking applications leaders like MySpace, Bebo, and soon after, Facebook which has had a furious year ever since they opened up the platform for integrating outside development integration.  At the same time, the young founder Mark Zuckerberg became known for coining a phrase that has increasingly become part of the popular lexicon for people following the social networking wars - the “social graph.”  It’s a term that for the most part I ignored for a while because I felt it was just a repackaging of the “six degrees of separation” concept. Nonetheless, it’s part of the lexicon now, and when I use the term, you know I’m thinking about my 200+ Facebook “friends.”

The social network phenomenon seems to have dovetailed another popular concept known as the “semantic web” that was (and still is) very hip and elusive idea.   Arguably, Web 2.0 has largely been about interaction and content.   Sites like social networks, twitter, article review sites like digg and reddit, the blog explosion, and reference content like Wikipedia have been some of the cornerstones of this revolution.

Following on the heels of defining Web 2.0, a lot of people began asking - what is Web 3.0 going to be then and what will it look like?  After a bit of thought, people soon came up with the idea of the semantic web - a concept of the web that takes the existing intelligence out there and makes it directly relevant and useful for the individual web consumer.   I’m not going to hash through all of what functions are envisioned in Web 3.0 - there’s a number of great papers/articles out there on that - but imagine if you will, an internet where you don’t start your experience by “googling.”

Think about that for a minute - you don’t search.  So much of  today’s web experience begins with a search for something that you believe is out there and for most of the world Google is the tool to get started.  I do it every day whether I’m looking for web development tricks or shopping for new shoes, I start with Google.  But the semantic web is essentially an intelligence engine that understands content, and understands how (also who, what, where, when, and why) you, as an individual participant in the online community relate to it and can feed you the information, the concepts, and the content that are meaningful, relevant, and timely.  The true nature of how this will work is currently elusive but there are a number of great sites and efforts - Twine, Freebase -  that seek to create that Wikipedia+ experience that will get us closer to Web 3.0.

So what is the Content Graph and why is it important here?

I’ve been observing some of the bleeding edge stuff going on with Web 2.0 lately - how it’s moving into mobile, how every leading tech thinker is now “Twittering” and buzzing around about what they’re doing, what they’re seeing, where they are, who they’re chatting with, and frankly, for months my head has been spinning to keep up and try and filter through what I should be paying attention to and what to ignore - I need Web 3.0 now!  Tonight I saw a great product that kind of flipped on the light switch and reminded me that Content is still king and we live with a highly disorganized web of information.

This does all go back to Twitter.  The past several months there’s been a huge upswing for development of interfaces to work with the Twitter API - apps that work with Twitter are coming out left and right from Twhirl to FriendFeed, to Swurl, to Twitteriffic, and so on.  None of these have ever helped me organize and keep relevant the tweets I get - and I get maybe 20/hour.  Guys like Robert Scoble who “follow” 21,000 people I have no idea how he filters out the stuff he needs to read.  But a new interface to Twitter called Tweenky (http://beta.tweenky.com) is pitched as having the Gmail look and feel to the Twitter experience and it aroused my curiosity.

It’s a beta product right now and can’t handle super high traffic so, understand if you can’t try it out for a while.  I got lucky. But, here’s the gist - Tweenky makes it possible to organize your tweets and makes it possible to experience them in a more contextually intelligent way.  Say I have about 50 people that I follow on Twitter and 10 of them are known Tech bloggers (@Scobleizer, @LaughingSquid, @TechCrunch, etc.) I can assign these guys into a folder where their tweets, in essence, become content with value to me as fed techie news.  I can drop inspiring entrepreneurial thinkers like (@Ross, @KathySierra) into another folder and view them separately.  You’re getting the idea here - I’m making channels of information out of my received tweets.

At the same time there’s an area in Tweenky called “Hot Topics” which just runs a quick search into the Twitter datastream for topics such as iPhone, Obama, or Dark Knight.  I can see what Twitteres out there are talking/thinking about these things and quickly add them to my follow list and drop them into a topic folder.

The key thing here is now, it’s not just the “who” that’s important as much as the “what” - we’ve now crossed over from the social graph back into what I’m calling the “Content Graph.”  Now it’s about what I’m truly interested in that connects me to the content/thoughts of others out there.  It’s not available yet but I could eventually look at who’s talking about “The Dark Knight” and cross reference it with who has high tweet content talking about music and maybe I can tailor a channel here where I’m getting content about great movie soundtracks.  The Content Graph here is more elusive and interesting her because when combined with social data, we’re looking at something that introduces great complexity and a wide degree of inaccuracy.  It will take time and (machine) intelligence to refine it but ultimately, we will see a powerful semantic system emerge as the Content Graph gets deeper, better refined, and understands it’s organic and evolving nature.

I’m excited about Tweenky because someone gets it - people who try to make a social content firehose like Twitter relevant in their online experience continually have to tweek and tune it by following and dropping the right and wrong people - the who is always far from perfect.  It’s been all about “who” ever since the social networks and the social graph concept came out the past couple of years.  Now, with a tool that moves the focus a little away from the who and more towards the what, we’re returning to a sense of how not just content but the right content is important to our online experience.  Figuring how to answer “why” and “how” as part of a user’s experience will also add to the semantic intelligence engine.  [And imagine if you will, how the mobile "location based experience" information can fit the "where" into this puzzle.]

So this is a start - and a great direction to be headed.  The information/content out there is being contextualized, ported, reviewed, and packaged, a thousand different ways and headed in just as many directions.  The metadata itself has metadata and so forth.  But turn the user experience in a way where being able to control and predict content is possible, and we’re getting ourselves closer and closer to the 3.0 Semantic Web.

Tags: socialnetworking Twitter Tweenky Content SemanticWeb We
Categories: Applied Technology & Learning
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