Twine, Applications and Green Fields

Looking at Robert Scoble's interview with Twine's Nova Spivack reminded me of Freebase, Knol and countless others before. Basically the interview goes like this:

1. Sir Tim Berners-Lee* has talked about the importance of the data web, or more recently about the Giant Global Graph (GGG)*.
2. Twine has built technology that can create, maintain and query a data web.
3. Let's sit at our editor, create a little data web, and run a query
4. Look how beautiful, imagine all the wonderful things you could do with this!

* Substitute appropriate visionary here, like Danny Hillis or Won Kim
** Substitute appropriate information infrastructure technology like "semantic database", "object-oriented database", etc.

Now I did enjoy the interview and the editor does look nifty but I was still a bit disappointed.

First because the presentation is very technology centric, cleverly leaving the applications to the imagination. But what's a dataweb (or any information infrastructure) without applications? No, the editor from step 2 doesn't count as an application. Even a query interface or browser barely deserves that qualification.

Compare that to a database like Oracle. The relational database concept developed by Jim Grey et al was a major breakthrough, as was the query language SQL. But there really isn't much use to a relational database until you run business applications on top of it -- think of Payroll or Shopping Cart. Oracle didn't win the database war from IBM, Informix, Tandem, Microsoft and countless others because their database was technologically most advanced, but because they focused on the applications -- lately in the extreme by selling the database as well as its applications, either developed in-house or obtained through myriad acquisitions. Here's a list, and that's only the "strategic" acquisitions!

So I perked up when Robert asked "what are the applications you have in mind", but I slumped back when I heard Nova answer "we think this is something that would be used by work groups".

The second disappointment was what I call the "Green Field Approach". The demo starts with Nova creating a Twine, cutting and pasting some text, and then creating relations with other twines and some existing web pages. A bit further in, Nova shows how you can import information from other sources, but that seems an afterthought: "we're looking at what other sources might be interesting".

But given the terabytes of information that are already out there it seems the last thing we need is human authors creating new pages -- shouldn't the main goal be to navigate, organize, link and clean up existing information? Shouldn't creating the dataweb be as easy as tagging -- which very successfully avoids the creation of original content?

The best of luck to information technology companies -- we definitely think of ourselves as one.

But remember:

No Apps, No Glory!

and

There is Plenty Information Already!