Semantic Web startup AdaptiveBlue is launching a new service today called Glue. The concept is sort of similar to MyBlogLog – showing recent visitors to a certain webpage – except it’s more like recent visitors to a given concept. So, for example, if you’re looking at the Wikipedia entry for the movie Iron Man, the Glue bar will show people that have visited webpages about Iron Man all around the Net, for example, on Netflix or IMDB.

This all works through a combination of a Firefox add-on (Get Glue), AdaptiveBlue’s contextual technology, and analyzing your existing social networks on services like Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed. In turn, if you’re visiting the Iron Man page on Wikipedia, you’ll see which of your friends from those sites (who have also installed Glue) have explored Iron Man content, with options to see additional metadata like comments, reviews, or “likes.” Additionally, Glue wants to help you discover new people, so you’ll see other members of Glue who are interested in the concept you’re viewing. This screencast explains how it all works a bit more in-depth:

In addition to launching Glue, AdaptiveBlue has also announced $4.5 million in Series B funding from Union Square Ventures and RRE Ventures. The company previously raised a Series A from Union Square in early 2007. AdaptiveBlue’s first product, BlueOrganizer, also utilizes the company’s semantic technology to recommend similar content when browsing the Web, also via a browser add-on.

As for Glue, it’s a very cool concept. Instead of thumbing through your friend’s reviews of different products across sites, or aggregated on a service like Friendfeed, Glue brings them together and puts them all in context while you’re browsing the way you typically would. However, even moreso than many other services, to be really useful, Glue is going to need to have a big-time user base. While it may work OK with a small network of friends when viewing really popular movies or music, in places where reviews are most helpful – the long-tail of content – the Glue experience could be a bit sparse until your whole social network (and beyond) has signed up.

Every once in a while, a little web app comes along, and you think it was definitely made with you in mind.  I know that most Mashable readers aren’t nearly as outrageous and offensive as I am (unless I’ve somehow provoked them with a politically themed post). As such, I’m generally more aware most when I’ve irked someone enough to unfollow me on Twitter.

In case you’re bleeding followers, and you’re not sure why, you should check out Qwitter. Longtime Mashable reader Des Traynor sent us his app this morning, something he whipped up to solve this problem. Simply give the system your Twitter name, an email address to contact you with, and you’ll recieve updates like this:

It’s a pretty slick idea. It does one useful thing, and that’s it.

Next time you say something unintentionally offensive, or reach a point where your noise is to high to your signal, you’ll have some earlier and more detailed warnings, as opposed to a simply disappointing and disappearing follow number.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

Source:Mashable!

Webbr is a new startup that provides a visual social network where you can see how everyone is connected at-a-glance. Many pundits believe that Web 3.0 (aka “the Semantic Web”) will be vastly more visual than what we see today in our Web 2.0 world. Despite the proliferation of online images and streaming videos, according to the experts, the near-future web experience will include an even greater amount of graphical elements.

Webbr believes it has developed a social network that gives us a glimpse of this visual future. Instead of just viewing lists of user names or websites, you can see images of users and how they are all connected visually as in this image.

In this new visual paradigm, you can now see not only how others members are connected but also how they connect to other things such as groups, clubs, interests, schools, and other elements. It’s refreshing new way to look at things, literally.

Real-time communication is the focal point of the service. Members can chat live and see updates to the visual map of interconnected users and groups in real-time - there’s no refreshing or browser updating. There’s also a built-in email client that manages all messages for members.

The entire site was developed on a flash platform which bodes well for Webbr’s plans to release a public API so members can actually develop flash applications that can be shared with other members on the service. There are a couple of sample Webbr flash games available today just to show you what it will be like. Another feature to check out is the web visualizer (seen above) that displays how everyone and everything is connected and the live Chat app as well as a couple of games such as Ballr and Blockr.

The service is in Beta so it still looks and feels a little sparse and raw. There aren’t a great deal of applications available yet, but obviously that might change once the API is released and members can start building and sharing apps. As for the graphical aspects of the site, the Web Visualizer loads quickly and allows you to navigate quickly from one member to another as well as from one group to another. It certainly is a different way of socializing online.

The real concern revolves around the question of scalability of the flash platform. How well will it perform once their membership grows? How will the applications function as their traffic becomes increasingly volatile? While the future of the web will indeed become more visual, only time will tell if Webbr’s flash platform can meet the requirements of a full-blown social network.

Partly due to boredom, and partly due to lack of more important news, I’ve taken the time to read the extremely thorough coverage of the new Macbook Pro, due to officially come out in a matter of hours. I don’t expect much from these type of events and I know that the hype around Apple is almost always (it wasn’t in the case of iPhone, hence “almost”) hugely exaggerated, but if the rumors are true, this time even I am underwhelmed.

What’s described over at Daring Fireball - and it seems to be an accurate description - is some cosmetic changes to Apple’s laptop line. Yes, that’s right: nothing important has changed at all - the Air didn’t get a second (or third) USB port; Macbook Pros still have pretty much the same CPUs inside; the screen is still glossy (yuck); hard drives in the Air and the 17” Pro have been updated, and the new Pro has a better (but still not top of the line) video card. That’s it: that’s all. Unless, of course, you’re really, really stoked about that black keyboard and aluminum finish and no-button trackpad (I’d like two buttons, not one, and not none at all, thank you). I’m not.

It’s a laptop, folks. Those come out every day.

[blurry image courtesy of Engadget]

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Secondbrain Announces Macbook Air WinnersMashable Announces SecondBrain Beta Launch: Win a MacBook AirHubLove Contest: Your Clue InsideHubPages.com HubLove Contest: Win $5000 in Super Cool PrizesIf Only Fergie Really Did Make a Scrabulous Video…TwitBuzz: Tracking the Memes of TwitterFirefox Extension Contest is On & Poppin’

Source:Mashable!

Who says there isn’t innovation going on? I’ve been waiting for quite some time to talk about a company I’ve known about for several months now. The project has been kept very hush-hush, but the bits and pieces I’ve learned about from several sources were put into context yesterday when I had a chance to speak with the CEO of the company heading up the project, Dag Kittlaus. 

The company is called Siri, and it’s so serious about it’s stealth status that it’s even registered the domain stealth-company.com. We chatted today over the fact that they’ve announced their $8.5 million Series A with Morgenthaler and Menlo Ventures.

Still, even with everything I know about the project, it’s difficult to frame it in just the right way without revealing more than I’m supposed to. Rather than focus on precisely how this works, I’ll talk a bit about the project from which the company originated.  It’s a small outfit you may have heard of called DARPA, also known as the place where the Internet was conceived.

DARPA gave the research outfit SRI International the contract to work on the CALO Project, which was commissioned with coming up with PAL. Word soup enough for you yet? CALO stands for “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes” and PAL stands for “Personalized Assistant that Learns.” The original applications were meant to be military in nature (CALO was inspired by the Latin root “calonis” which means “soldier’s servant), but as Dag explained today, the enterprise applications are pretty obvious.

What Siri is Up Against

One of the holy grails in AI research, something I’m pretty familiar with from my own personal experience, is putting together a personal assistant that is both friendly, useful and reliable.  There are a couple of factors that tend to impede these well-meaning projects from being actually useful.  The first part is the semantic interpreters - the English language is a tough thing, and so far most projects still function on the Turing principal, which is more about fooling judges into thinking the machine is sentient rather than attempting ‘actual sentience.’

As a result, most personal assistants will break down under heavy usage either revealing their limitations or by the other major shortcoming common to these projects: inefficient and frankly ‘dumb’ information storage methods.

Most of the chatterbox AIs, for which most personal assistant AIs revolve around, function off the Eliza methodologies (or if you need something more recent, Alice). In Loebner/Turing tests where the job is to produce good conversations, their information storage methods work wonderfully. When it comes to specific information storage and retrieval, asking the same question with slightly different wording can produce wildly different answers.

That’s Quite a Feat

These were the sorts of technical hurdles that CALO faced when they were assigned $200 million and a mandate to make AI work. These issues have been present in every AI that’s attempted to tackle the personal assistant problem for the last thirty years. There have been one or two exceptions, but no breakout stars have emerged into the public eye.

Some of the folks have been exposed to it have called Siri a search engine, but it really promises to be a whole lot more.  The way people interact with the Internet is still very highly manual, and Siri is an attempt to create an automated way of going at it. 

So much of what we have in Web 2.0 and social media is waiting to be used in this way. Every tool we interact with daily has an API, and we’ve been manually hooking them into just about every service and social network we’ve signed up for in the last six months. Back last November, I jokingly suggested some potential definitions to the successor technology for Web 2.0, and referenced Eric Schmidt and Ken Rutkowski’s Web 3.0 definition: “applications that are pieced together.”

Chances are, you don’t need yet another search engine to go out and find content on the web. You need bridges between your own content and communications. You need your calendar to be aware immediately when you schedule a meeting via your email. If there’s a scheduling conflict, it wouldn’t be completely unwelcome if your personal assistant contacted you and the other participants to find a common time that works for everyone. 

There are literally hundreds of applications along these lines that an intelligent learning agent can touch points of interaction in our lives and make the mundane parts of the day disappear. I’m waiting with baited breath to see exactly how ambitious Siri intends to be in tackling these issues it’ parent projects set out to do.

The ever popular HOT or NOT has unleashed several new features with the hope of adding more spice to their service with a greater focus on celebrity photos and gossip. All of the traditional meat market features like rating member photos are still there, they just added a whole bunch of new things to rank and rate.

HOT or NOT Gossip does exactly that, it covers all of the latest hot and juicy celebrity gossip. Not only that, members can now vote on the “hotness” or “notness” of celebrities.

Another fun new item is the Celebrity Look-A-Likes feature which lets you view celebrities that resemble each other such as the example below of Sarah Palin and Tina Fey. 

The nice thing about Look-a-likes is that it isn’t relegated to just comparing celebrities. Other things are examined such as this eerily similar Ad campaign.

HOT or NOT Polls is a new feature that will let members rate candidates from popular shows and current events on a 1-10 “hot scale.” For example, athletes from the 2008 Olympics would have been featured in this area. Obviously, political figures will see a great deal of action in the coming weeks. The results of the polls will be updated on a daily basis.

The HOTLIST feature seems to be the best and most useful new addition to the service.  It lets you share your interests with the HOT or NOT community by rating and sharing what you think is hot in pop culture (Celebrities, Products, Gadgets, Food, etc.).  It’s a visual collection of all the things you like most, which reveals a lot about people. 

You can show off your interests on your profile and even add them to your favorite sites (MySpace, Bebo, Xanga, etc.) via embeddable widgets. 

Overall, HOT or NOT has added some fun and even useful features this time around and even changed their logo. Of course, many of their best features aren’t accessible in the free account version. If you want to contact any of these hotties then you’ll need to pony up a few bucks to upgrade to one of their premium accounts. Otherwise, the service is still a fun place to visit for a few laughs.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:GeoTwitterous: Personalized Twitter on a MapBrabblr Updates Your Twitter, et al.Facebook Status Updates: The “is” is No MoreFacebook for BlackBerry Drops The “Is” From Your Friend’s Status UpdatesMySpace Friend Updates Arrive. Is Anyone Still Using MySpace?Xing’s Business Social Network Gets a News FeedLinkedIn Adds RSS Network Updates, Gives iPhone Users a Boost

Source:Mashable!

With all of the information coming from Reuters the past two days, it has become obvious that Reuters is leading the Semantic Web charge. Gasp! Reuters is an “old media” company, right? We also hear today that they have decided to monetize it as well! Obviously, they do not understand how this Web 2.0 thing works, and maybe that is a good thing. They have announced commercial options for the Calais service in order to support the demands of enterprises and major publishers. The various options of Calais break down as follows:

- OpenCalais - the free Calais Web service that has an open API. Users of the service can request 40,000 content transactions per day and a limit of 4 per second. Information and resources can be found at OpenCalais.com

- Calais Professional - is the same service as OpenCalais, but provides more transactions and 24×7 monitoring. The daily transaction count is increased to a maximum of 100,000 and a limit of 20 per second. Additional transactions can also be purchased.

- Calais Professional for Publishers - is the professional option for large scale publishers. It also has an option to purchase the service as an annual contract.

- Calais Enterprise - is the “enterprise software” version of Calais. Enterprises can install a customized version of Calais within the enterprise’s IT infrastructure. In addition to the functionality provided by the above options, enterprise users can create their own entities and relations in order to add information to the metadata that is generated by Calais.

Of course, this news is right on the heels of the public launch of SemanticProxy.com. What Reuters has done is converted Semantic Web concepts into enterprise ready software. Given the struggles that semantic Web companies have in gaining user adoption, an old media company may be forcibly mainstreaming the technology. Paul Miller of ZDNet gives a good idea of what SemanticProxy can do as well as highlights the future in Linked Data:

“A tool like SemanticProxy makes it straightforward to generate structured metadata from pages on the open Web. Furthermore, it respects the Linked Data community’s ‘rules‘, and Tague stressed that;

‘SemanticProxy will return dereferenceable Linked Data URIs by the end of this quarter.”

Reuters knows that they have not solved the problem, but they are hoping to start a trend:

“SemanticProxy is our attempt to jumpstart the semantic consumer end of the equation. We have all the standards we need. What we’re missing is a critical mass of semantically enhanced content.

SemanticProxy doesn’t solve that problem, but it can act as a catalyst.”

This is something that the semantic Web has sorely been missing, a catalyst. As much work as the semantic Web companies have been putting into concepts like Linked Data, there has not been the type of adoption they have hoped for. Reuters has shown that they know media is changing. With the OpenCalais project and the new release of Semantic Proxy, they have shown that they plan on leading the way. And for those people complaining about Web services not knowing how to monetize, Reuters has a plan for that too.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:CNN Dropping Reuters After 27 YearsReuters Labs Launches Search People in Video FeatureReuters Choses Attribtor to Protect ContentLook Out NWS: Reuters Building a Financial MySpaceReuters May Be Acquired for $15 Billion+Reuters Gets Social with New Stock SiteReuters Offers More Videos to Publishers

Sematic search engine Quintura has announced a new distribution partnership in which they will power the search for Maxim Digital’s Web properties which include Maxim.com and Blender.com.  Yakov Sadchikov, President & CEO of Quintura said, “Our strategic partnership with the online leader in men’s lifestyle, Maxim Digital, demonstrates Quintura’s ability to provide interactive site search solutions to consumer web publishers with millions of monthly users."

The search functionality is now live on Maxim’s site. Google Trends shows about 30k users a day to Maxim and about 15k to Blender.

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Semantic search provider Evri is moving into public beta today. Evri debuted at the D6 conference last month and I’ve embedded the presentation below. Founder Neil Roseman explains the Evri mission as, "(to) help users make more sense of the content on the Web." In the launch blog post tonight, Roeman continues, "Evri is building a data graph of the web, using our technology to understand the People, Places and Things in the web content read every day-and the actions that connect them to each other."

Dan Farber was on location at D6 and has a good overview of the service. Evri seems like it’s in the same sector as NY-based Hakia.

Update: Frederic over at RWW has more details on the semantic side of Evri.

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NY-based Hakia is announcing the launch of their white-label semantic Web search (they call it Syndication Web Services) today. The idea is simple - you can now add Hakia’s services to your site offering more intense search functionality for your visitors.

The business model is welcoming; offer 30,000 searches per day free of charge and free of advertising then they will discuss a relationship with you past the 30,000. What this means is that small social networks may never pay anything for using the Hakia service but provide a great benefit for their users.

The Syndication Web Services include Web search, News search, Vertical search, Summarizer, Categorizer, Characterizer and Text Meaning Representation. The services provide an XML feed, and options to customize the feed. The first company using the new service is Berggi. Berggi has created a worldwide mobile search application.

This month Hakia added PubMed to their search index and also checkout our comparison of Hakia and Powerset.

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