The Guidewire

Anyone with even a remote interest in the semantic space has likely experienced the same roller coaster I have regarding Powerset. When I first spoke with Barney Pell over a year ago, the semantic tech sector was an entirely different landscape. I was intrigued by my conversation with Barney and the short demo I saw of Powerset-enabled search. How nifty that the engine knows what I mean by “who did IBM acquire”! But as months went by, we didn’t hear much from Powerset, save a seemingly incongruous Labs announcement. And we heard much from other players in the space. The focus of the semantics community moved away from search to organization - making users’ Internet activity easier to manage - and answering the question of how to take semantics to the masses. Frankly, I had dismissed Powerset as an early mover in the space that had run out of steam. Boy was I wrong.

Powerset’s introduction today of its new Wikipedia search, which also integrates data from Freebase, could have a significant impact on the tech market overall, in that it changes the rules of the search game. Users who experience the incredibly deep, interactive, and intuitive nature of the Powerset search will be even more frustrated with the standard string of result pages delivered by traditional keyword search. Once you’ve dug into the meat of a Wikipedia article with just a couple of clicks, zeroing in on precise actions and entities and going directly to their citations in the article, paging through flat hyperlinks just ain’t going to cut it.

Powerset’s changing of the rules is evidenced by one key statement made by the company: a page of search results, no matter how targeted, is just the beginning of the effort required by the user. Once you’ve found relevant links, you still have to click through to new pages and scour the text for usable information. Powerset’s new way of searching attempts to do some of that work for you; with the scouring and drilling down already complete, you arrive at what you need much quicker.

The Outline feature of the Powerset search is a real gem and I expect will set a new standard for UI in search technology. Having a constant window beside the text as you browse provides an incredibly simple way to jump back and forth between concepts and facts. It could make the browser’s back button obsolete.

What I don’t love about the new search is that it’s currently only on Wikipedia. There are many searches I typed in that can’t take advantage of all this whiz-bang semantic technology. More nebulous concepts aren’t Wikipedia’s strong suit, so Powerset only returns standard results. Example: “Can Hillary win the democratic nomination” returned relevant results but no Wikipedia entry to plumb. So my big “if” with this announcement is whether Powerset can pursue a successful content partnership strategy. If the right publishers, and enough of them, integrate Powerset search into their sites, the long-anticipated threat to Google could finally take shape. No matter the long-term outcome, though, Powerset has raised the bar for search interaction and usability.

As I approached the tent where the Women 2.0 conference was about to start, I was struck by the string of prayer flags along the back wall.  That, as least, was what it looked like from a distance.   Up close, I realized that the organizers had strung up the entries -dozens of plans sketched out on standard dinner napkins — in the “Business Plan on a Napkin” competition.

Looking at these plans, up close and from a distance, and thinking about the aspirations of the women (and men) in the room and the ambitions of every entrepreneur I meet, I decided that these are prayer flags of a sort after all.

Here are some of the images I captured at yesterday’s event:

By the way, notice Christine Herron in one of the photos… now we know where First Round Capital finds its deals.

Those of us who are full - and sometimes egregious - participants in the social Web have quickly discovered that aggregation is vital in maintaining some sort of sanity. While there have been plenty of entrants in the aggregation space in recent months, the new Yoono add-on for Firefox is taking the sector in a new direction. By providing a consolidated stream of social services - FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter and others - along with chat, Web clipping, photos and videos, Yoono aims to provide an all-in-one tool for navigating one’s online life.

The UI is what initially piqued my excitement for Yoono. It’s simply the best I’ve seen. Simple-to-navigate widgets sit in an inconspicuous sidebar that opens only when you need it, small pop-up windows give informative snapshots of contacts and updates, all clicks open to a new tab, and photos and videos temporarily overlay the current Web page in a slick little feature I hadn’t seen before Yoono. The company has obviously put a large amount of effort and focus into design and it’s welcomed. At this stage of the social Web, it’s the type of UI we should start expecting from every product.

I have to be honest, though, and say that my enthusiasm waned slightly after a few days of putting Yoono through its paces. The app can drain a lot of memory and when you’re dealing with Vista, you need every little bit. (Macolytes, I don’t want to hear it.) I’ve also found myself drifting back to the FriendFeed page to read updates; the Yoono window just requires too much scrolling.

When I brought up that last complaint to Erica Lee, Yoono’s PR rep, she made a good point: Yoono isn’t intent on taking you away from regularly visited sites. The service instead wants to give you a one-stop dashboard, a more informative, simpler place from which to navigate. Perhaps then, the lifestream in the sidebar could be consolidated more, giving aggregated shots of FriendFeed activity, for instance. An aggregation of the aggregators, if you will. Stop me before I aggregate again.

My nits with Yoono, though, are just that - nits. Because I’m so impressed with what they’re attempting and the product they’ve designed, I’m even more demanding of perfection from it. Yoono is one step away from being a must-have product on my social Web list. With what I’ve seen of the team’s focus, responsiveness and overall aggregation philosophy, I imagine they’ll leap past my expectations rather quickly.

**We’ve been given 200 Yoono invite codes for interested Guidewire readers. Click here before they disappear.**

Carefully and deliberately over the past two years, Clipblast! has laid the foundation for a cross-Internet video distribution platform. First order, Clipbast! indexed video across the Web, aggregating video content no matter where it lives. Then, at DEMOfall 07, the company introduced its API and widget strategy that enabled other sites to easily incorporate Clipbast! indexes.

On both counts, Clipblast! has gained momentum in the market and today indexes some 1 million video clips each day.

Now, Clipblast! lays the keystone in the strategy with the introduction this week of Clipblast! Playbox. Playbox is, in effect, a universal content distribution platform that enables any video to be played from any site on any site. It’s best to think of Playbox as a conduit to video content, encapsulating an array of video players so that users can view video even if they’ve not downloaded a specific media player. The video itself, along with pre-, mid-, and post-roll advertisements and overlays are unchanged, allowing the originating video site to capture ad revenues as well as traffic data.

Clipblast! is working with content providers to enable them to the Playbox video distribution platform in their sites.

Clipblast! is a great example of the next phase of the Web (let’s not call it Web 3.0?) that is not so much about aggregating content and traffic as it is about distributing it. In this next wave, content providers needn’t build destination sites but will embrace syndication models that enable them to put their content in front of millions of users at thousands of sites across the Web.

This is a tough model for a lot of publishers to get their heads around in ad-based models, where audience is everything and the one who owns the platform reaps the ad revenue. Now, though, with the ability to target and embed ad messaging into content - as pre-, mid-, and post-roll video, for example, or within content widgets - the game is about taking content to the traffic, not attracting traffic to the content.

The idea is catching on slowly; I’m seeing a few massive content distribution/syndication models every week. In one instance, the company hasn’t even bothered to build its own consumer-facing Web site; it just wants to get its content onto everyone else’s sites. Makes for a massively scalable model.

In the future, sites like YouTube won’t be the center of the universe not because they’ve been displaced by other competitors, but because new competitors prove that the universe really has no center.