Shaping Network Society

For a while, we have been trying to develop a MECE framework to think about how we want to access data in our mediated environments. We started out with search (google), but missed that what was at the tip of our tongue, namely discovery (think any recommendation engine or stumbleupon), then where awed by the global thought stream (twitter and the facebook stream), but had always hoped for a chance to mine “real” knowledge.

There is the Eyeplorer, a startup from Berlin you might want to take a look at and today Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame will speak at the Berkman Center about his new venture Wolframalpha. Do watch it here at 3PM EST today (9 PM Erfurt time) Or watch and interact in Second Life: http://tinyurl.com/s6tv4

For the longest time, there has been a debate, about what is the next big challenge on the way to “augmented reality” after search. Logically, it should be discovery, but somehow sites like Stumbleupon have not hit the main stream. Over the last year the buzz around twitter has grown stronger and Erick Schonfeld argues on Techcrunch that we are moving into a world, where we can mine the “thought stream” of the world:

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.

Translated into the frameworks of the venture capitalists, Twitter is an interesting proposition, because it is:

1. Open.  That makes it easy for others to build on top of Twitter and it also makes it searchable.
2. Real time. It is a huge database of what is happening right now.
3. Ubiquitous. You can get to it from just about any device.
4. Scalable. (Don’t laugh)
5. Persistent. It allows for an archive of what is happening and what has happened, which is searchable (see No. 1).