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Yahoo’s Only Hope, Dataspaces

We have all been reading the tweets and news about Yahoo! cutting between 4-6% of their workforce. A sad thing indeed, but not at all unexpected. What do you expect when your chief competitor is a verb namely Google. How can they possibly compete? They’ve given up on search, they handed that to Microsoft. I have an idea. Own the emerging user Dataspace. What the F…. is a user Dataspace?

Essentially it’s the personal cloud of data your presence on the web produces. It’s not simply your blog, Buzz and Twitter accounts, but the aggregation of them all across the web.  We have docs in the cloud, Pictures in the cloud, movies, YouTube videos, etc. There are Exabytes of conversions, blog post with multimedia, twitter musings, emails, IM chat sessions, SMS’s that exist across hundreds of services.  There is no homogeneous way to organize them. I have written of this before in previous blog posts specifically with data. If you mapped these data points across N-dimensions you would begin to fathom the concept of Dataspaces. Think of it as a nebulous cloud of digital information that surrounds ones self based on all the digital “bread crumbs” we leave across the web.  I currently have a presence across five email accounts, three IM accounts, three social network sites and three computing devices across three network domains (Corporate LANs, cellular, Home-based internet).  How do I control that? Archive that?  All these digital bread crumbs are data and we produce more of it than we have the capacity as human beings to make use of. We need a method that allows use (mankind) to collect, analyze, categorize, visualize and utilize that data – our data.  This is where the concepts of Dataspaces comes in. Yahoo! could be that service.  Google is there but not in a coherent way. Microsoft could have owned this emerging space 10 years ago!  Facebook is starting to put all the pieces together, but there is still an opening. Now there will require new was to think of, store, access and categorize data.  Users want ubiquitous services across devices and web properties and advertiser and data merchants want user data.

To make this a reality concepts such as Synopsis data structures, latent semantic analysis and probabilistic database will need to come along a lot more in their development, but Yahoo! still has remaining some pretty smart folks.  They still have a huge global user base with Yahoo! mail and it is still one of the most visited portal pages in the world.  To be exact lets call the new Yahoo! CloudSpace (trademarked Relative Progress LLC) service a Web 3.0 portal.  What’s old is new again I alway say.  Buck up remaining and soon-to-be former Yahoo! employees I may have just save your sorry asses from oblivion.  Your welcome.

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A Real Life Cyber War is Raging

Unless you have been living under a rock or have Verizon as you mobile provider or Comcast as your ISP, we are witnessing a true cyber war. Here is a recap of the battles raging at this moment.

We live in interesting and disturbing times. This new level of open hostility that could have unintended consequences with roving groups and anarchist and rogue government elements crippling the overall Internet is a cold-war like M.A.D.

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Data As Currency, Information As Commodity

What Wikileaks demonstrates to me is that information, like money will always seek the path of least restriction. Information is derived from data and more and more of it is available.  More of it will leak out, this is axiomatic. This got me to thinking about the larger implications of data and the commodity it produces, information.  It is as I have stated, its analogous to money. I have harped and shrilled to anyone who’d let me vent about what the future of the information age could be with the advent of ever larger and numerous data sets produced by all of us. I commonly call it an agent’s Dataspace, with us and our activities playing the agents.

There are huge social networks encompassing massive network graphs with dozens of tentacles of interconnections between sites, likes, links and media.   If you have a Facebook Page coupled with a Twitter account linked to You Tube with a blog site producing content and linking to insights you have yourself a nebulous dataspace already.  Not to mention the inclusion of mobile meta-data we create with every text, geo-location movements, App API calls and phone conversations. Like it or not this data is collected by someone whom later will utilize it to create value. So I have always asked as a user of all these services,  that we pump tremendous value into, don’t you have a right to that data or at least access to it? Many of the services we use for relatively little or free gain great value from our use it. It is in essence the currency they exchange for real dollars to advertisers and any other data merchants. Exabytes of conversions, blog posts with multimedia, Twitter musings, emails, IM chat sessions, SMS’s and etc. exist across hundreds of services.  If you mapped these data points across N-dimensions you would begin to fathom the concept of Dataspaces.

Now enter the growing importance of scientific and computing power available today that now allow keen insight to be extracted from large volumes of heterogeneous data (dataspace).  That data breeds meta-data which when analyzed farther begins to be shaped into information. The type of actionable intelligence moves commodity markets or bring efficiencies to retail supply chains. All these digital bread crumbs of data we produce become a raw material like iron ore and wood that when sold to practitioners capable of molding intermediate products, which are further processed through a digital supply chain.  More of it exists than we have the capacity as human beings to make use of. You could say it is an inexhaustible resource, but there is no such thing. We need a method that allows use (mankind) to collect, analyze, categorize, visualize and utilize that data – our data. That is the future of information as a commodity.  A commodity that derives its value from data. The true currency of the 21th century. The winners of this new future will be those that help us manage the Dataspaces constructs I’ve described.

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My Mind Was A Blank

It feels strange writing a blog post since its been a couple of weeks, but tonight my mind was a blank and thats when I write about random stuff.

Pouring over my Feedly links and Twitter when I came across this article. Sean Parker, of Napster, Facebook and having ‘Justin Timberlake play me in a movie‘ fame, was bemoaning the current state of Venture capital in Silicon Valley. The chorus has started, according to the holy of holy super angels, that the valley is in a Bubble, 1990’s style.  It’s not like we couldn’t see it coming.  With angels and VC investors bitching about valuations the next logical question is how could they have allowed this to happen again?  Remember when Mike Arrington sort of walked into a bar of “Super Angels” and came to the rash conclusion via his sources that these “Super Angels” were colluding to keep the valuations of start-ups down?   Maybe they were on to something.  So while we praise Herr Arrington for possibly uncovering something that might have been illegal, lets pause and have moment of silence for the start-ups with incredibly foolish valuations or the start-ups that have no damn business being funded. Their already DOA or as TechCrunch has coined the term ‘deadpooled‘.  Maybe they should have tried to keep those valuations down?  When the word got out and the holy-than-thou weighed in, the bubble began. The secret was out and the fools rushed in.  When the general consensus is saying we’re in a bubble, I say this could have been avoided with a little bit of collusion.  Forgive me I’m feeling a bit conspiratorial and evil tonight.

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5 Stories..5 Random Thoughts for 5 Nov 2010

Google #Fail

So Google Voice has been up and down all week. The same can be said with Google Buzz and Gmail too. Can’t post to Buzz, can’t refresh the feed. I think all of Google’s infrastructure has been f’ing up lately.  Maybe you should hire back all the Googlers who keep leaving for Facebook.

NY Jets

What is it with hot bitches and the NY Jets sideline?  Inaz Sines is now joined by Jenn Sterger as hot chick hanging out in the locker room and sidelines of NY Jet games. And you wonder why you get harassed?


Data “Trade War”

Stole that headline from Mike Arrington‘s post at Techcrunch because it’s apt for what is happening between Facebook and Google. Review: Google changed its terms of service for those who access its Contacts API. Essentially if you don’t share with them you can’t access there API. Dark clouds are forming and this could get ugly. Data as the new good and service of the future will start turf wars like this all over the web. Like capital flows across boundaries so does data across virtual boundaries via API calls. So in a way this is a textbook example of a trade war.

Social Media and the 2010 Elections

No matter whom you rooting for in this Tuesday’s elections one thing was evident, social media played a pivotal role in predicting the outcome.  With all the data produced from likes to retweets it was an easy tasks to predict U.S. House races with a nearly 70+% accuracy.  Even blatant attempts at austrturfing via Twitter show that social media has arrived. There were tons of maps mashups and real-time statistics that made this election the most social media centric election so far. I can’t wait to see what will happen in 2012.

U.S. Cyber Command “FOC”

I mean where the F was this command when I was in?  Seriously this is good to hear, but as a government contractor I can tell you exactly what this means. The contracts are in place (for the contractors and civilians to do the work) and the money is flowing.