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.