David Duey

Auto-Homing Data

Last week I’d had a little bit of an epiphany while reading one of Brad Feld’s posts.  I made the following comment to his post:

When I read your paragraph about legacy data, I started thinking about your Glue theme and the bad Terminator (T-1000) in the movie Terminator 2. When the bad Terminator was torn apart, its various pieces would return to collective (for lack of a better description). Wouldn't it be cool if your data could automagically find its way home?

Since then, the possibility of auto-homing data has been rolling around in my head.  The basic idea is to have your data return home to a central repository regardless of the original entry point for the data. 

For example, I typed the comment above into Brad Feld’s blog, but I would like to have a copy of the comment along with the comment’s context (date, blog etc.) for my own personal data store.  Currently, Brad Feld has my data; I can copy it and paste it into a document or a database, but I have to do that myself, there’s nothing that will do it for me.

With auto-homing data, I want my data to automatically find my data store and incorporate itself into the collective.  This may seem a little strange at first, but in many ways it’s similar to email.  With email, content is created and sent to an address; the content did not have to be created at a specific place or within a specific application, it just has to be sent to the correct address.

I think we have all of the technologies we need to make auto-homing data happen.  Something as simple as an html tag or a microformat could be used to demarcate data for auto-homing.  We have the transport protocols, POP, XMPP and other standards to help move data around.  Almost all data storage systems (i.e. databases) can interact with XML and JSON formatted data.  And, there’s a ping service, Gnip Central, that could be used to notify a system that new and updated auto-homing data is available.

Of course, there are a number of obstacles to overcome such as walled gardens and data spam (yep!), but I think those obstacles could be overcome.  I think it’ll happen; I think I’ll see the day when my data will automagically appear in the collective and I want to be a part of making that happen.

Social Networks -> Knowledge Networks

Peter Rip posted a really juicy entry about social networks evolving into knowledge networks (well, there's actually more to it than that) titled, "More Than Who You Know, It's What You Know."  It's smells of the stuff of the implcit web. 

The Implicit Web and Social Network APIs

I’ve been thinking a bit about the implicit web and social network APIs.  I can see were companies like Lijit (I still need to install the Lijit wijit) and Confluence Commons can have a huge impact in the future.  As social network APIs become available, like the Facebook API, the APIs can provide a lot of information that can be used to enable the implicit web. 

The initial services that companies like Lijit offer may not be nearly as important as what they can potentially offer in the future.

Forget the Book, Watch the Video

I read a lot of books; many of them are business books or business related.  In my opinion, one of the major problems with business books is that they’re too long.  They’re often repetitive and filled with too many anecdotes and stories that do little to support author’s assertions.  I’d much rather pay an equivalent price for a good, concise business book than I would the typical bloated business book that’s heavy on the anecdotes and light on insight. In fact, I believe that if you could iterate through the typical business book and remove redundancies and anecdotes, you’d probably reduce most of them down to a one page summary, or at best, a magazine length article.

That’s my segue to a really good TechStars video of the MyBlogLog founders’ session with the TechStars crew.  The video is a gold mine of information and advice for any web startup.  It’s 80 minutes long.  I’ve watched it twice.  I wish I could buy the book.  There’s a ton of information and I think watching the video is time well spent.  My only advice is to be sure to keep your favorite note-taking tools handy; there’s a lot of stuff you’ll probably want to jot down and think about.

What Is and What Is Possible

I really like this quote from Peter Rip's blog:

VCs have always made money at finding the ideal point of friction between the Present and the Future.  Profits accumulate in the gap between What Is and What Is Possible.  Web  2.0 is now firmly in the category of What Is.